SAS timer - the key to writing efficient SAS code

New Year to me is always a stark reminder of the inexorability of Time. In a day-to-day life, time is measured in small denominations - minutes, hours, days… But come New Year, and this inescapable creature – Time – makes its decisive leap – and in a single instant, we become officially older and wiser by the entire year’s worth.

What’s a better time to re-assess ourselves, personally and professionally! What’s a better time to Resolve to improve your SAS programming skills, as skillfully crafted by Michael A. Raithel in his recent blog post.

I thought I could write a post showing how to be efficient and kill two birds with one stone. The birds here are two New Year’s Raithel’s proposed resolutions:

#2 Volunteer to help junior SAS programmers.

#12 Reduce processing time by writing more efficient programs.

To combine the two, I could have titled this post “Helping junior SAS programmers to reduce processing time by writing more efficient programs”. However, I am not going to “teach” you efficient coding techniques which are a subject deserving of a multi-volume treatise. I will just give you a simple tool that is a must-have for any SAS programmer (not just junior) who considers writing efficient SAS code important. This simple tool has been the ultimate judge of any code’s efficiency and it is called timer.

What is efficient?

Setting aside hardware constraints and limitations (which are increasingly diminishing nowadays), efficient means fast or at least fast enough not to exceed ever-shrinking user tolerance of wait time.

Of course, if you are developing a one-time run code to generate some ad-hoc report or produce results for uniquely custom computations, your efficiency criteria might be different, such as “as long as it ends before the deadline” or at least “does not run forever”.

However, SAS code is often developed for some interactive applications. In these scenarios multiple users run the code over and over again. It may run behind the scenes of a web application with a user waiting (or rather not wanting to wait) for results. In these cases, SAS code must be really fast, and any improvement in its efficiency is multiplied by the number of times it is run.

What is out there?

SAS provides the following SAS system options to measure the efficiency of SAS code:

STIMER. You may not realize that you use this option every time you run a SAS program. This option is turned on by default (NOSTIMER to turn it off) and controls information written to the SAS Log by each SAS step. Each step of a SAS program by default generates the following sample NOTE in SAS Log:

NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
real time 1.31 seconds
cpu time 1.10 seconds

FULLSTIMER. This option (NOFULLSTIMER to turn it off) provides much more information on used resources for each step. A sample Log output of a FULLSTIMER option for a SAS Data Step is listed below:

NOTE: DATA statement used:
real time 0.06 seconds
user cpu time 0.02 seconds
system cpu time 0.00 seconds
Memory 88k
Page Faults 10
Page Reclaims 0
Page Swaps 0
Voluntary Context Switches 22
Involuntary Context Switches 0
Block Input Operations 10
Block Output Operations 12

While the FULLSTIMER option provides plenty of information for SAS code optimization, in many cases it is more than you really need. On the other hand, STIMER may provide quite valuable information about each step, thus identifying the most critical steps of your SAS program.

Get your own SAS timer

If your efficiency criteria is how fast your SAS program runs as a whole, than you need an old-fashioned timer. The one with start and stop events and time elapsed between them. To achieve this in SAS programs, I use the following technique.

At the very beginning of your SAS program, place the following line of code that effectively starts the timer and remembers the start time:

/* Start timer */
%let _timer_start = %sysfunc(datetime());

At the end of your SAS program place the following code snippet that captures the end time, calculates duration and outputs it to the SAS Log:

/* Stop timer */
data _null_;
dur = datetime() - &_timer_start;
put 30*'-' / ' TOTAL DURATION:' dur time13.2 / 30*'-';
run;

The resulting output in the SAS log will look like this:

------------------------------
TOTAL DURATION: 0:01:31.02
------------------------------

Despite its utter simplicity, this little timer program is a very convenient tool to improve your SAS code efficiency. You can use it to compare or benchmark your SAS programs in their entirety.

Warning. In the above timer, I used the datetime() function. I insist on using it instead of the time() function as I saw in many online resources. Keep in mind that the time() function resets to 0 at midnight. While time() will work just as well when start and stop times are within the same date, it will produce completely meaningless results when start time falls within one date and stop time falls within another date. You can easily trap yourself in when you submit your SAS program right before midnight while it ends after midnight. This will result in an incorrect, even negative, duration.

I hope using this SAS timer will help you writing more efficient SAS programs.

SAS timer - the key to writing efficient SAS code was published on SAS Users.