Date:         Tue, 7 Nov 2000 10:09:52 -0800
Reply-To:     kmself@IX.NETCOM.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         kmself@IX.NETCOM.COM
Subject:      Re: deleting formats
In-Reply-To:  <39F5F9EF00001AF4@mail.direxus.com>; from lend@IWON.COM on Tue,
              Nov 07, 2000 at 06:41:51AM -0800
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on Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 06:41:51AM -0800, Len De La Cruz (lend@IWON.COM) wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> How do I delete formats that seem to stay in memory?
> 
> Any opinion or reply is greatly appreciated.

My experience, based on SAS 6.x, was that there was no way to free
memory used by SAS formats, once invoked.  I posted a number of articles
concerning this during Winter 1998 (Dec 97 - Apr 98) to SAS-L, as I was
working with some very large formats (1m - 40m values) at the time.
Memory impacts could be considerable.  For smaller formats (up through a
few tens of thousands of values -- "typical" in SAS use), the impacts
tend to be acceptable.

My observation was that *creating* the format didn't result in a
persistant memory hit, but *accessing* a format in a data step or proc
would load the format into memory, from which it was never removed.
This was observed under Sun Solaris using system monitoring tools,
principally 'ps'.  IIRC, the behavior was confirmed with SI at the time.

Suggest you contact SI to find out if this bug has been fixed either in
6.x or subsequent versions of SAS.  I did file it as a fix request at
the time. 

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc.                      http://www.zelerate.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?      There is no K5 cabal
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/        http://www.kuro5hin.org

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