Paul,

paul_dorfman@HOTMAIL.COM (Paul Dorfman) writes:

> (My impression has been that this sort of thing has been available > on some commercial Unices, too, but here I am not sure. Someone who > knwos will surely chime in.)

This got me curious so I ran your test on a SUNFire 280R 2x~900Mhz, 4Gb, Solaris 9 :

NOTE: AUTOEXEC processing completed.

1 option cpucount = actual; 2 option msglevel = i ; 3 *libname user "h:\" ; 4 data a ; 5 array nn (100) ; do _n_ = 1 to 100 ; nn (_n_) = _n_ ; end ; 6 array cc (100) ; do _n_ = 1 to 100 ; cc (_n_) = _n_ ; end ; 7 do _n_ = 1 to 1e6 ; 8 key1 = ranuni (1) ; 9 key2 = ranuni (1) ; 10 key3 = ranuni (1) ; 11 output ; 12 end ; 13 run ;

NOTE: The data set WORK.A has 1000000 observations and 203 variables. NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time): real time 47.82 seconds cpu time 13.91 seconds

14 15 option threads ; 16 proc sort data = a out = b ; 17 by key: ; 18 run ;

NOTE: SAS threaded sort was used. NOTE: There were 1000000 observations read from the data set WORK.A. NOTE: The data set WORK.B has 1000000 observations and 203 variables. NOTE: PROCEDURE SORT used (Total process time): real time 1:33.51 cpu time 1:04.64

19 20 option nothreads ; 21 proc sort data = a out = b ; 22 by key: ; 23 run ;

NOTE: SAS sort was used. NOTE: There were 1000000 observations read from the data set WORK.A. NOTE: The data set WORK.B has 1000000 observations and 203 variables. NOTE: PROCEDURE SORT used (Total process time): real time 1:34.86 cpu time 54.98 seconds

> As you see, when SAS uses 2 CPUs in the SMP mode, it (logically) uses twice > the CPU time, but how cares if the real time is 1/6 that of the non-threaded > sort. Impressed?

In neither case on the Solaris server was the process CPU-bound. Also as you can see, there is much less difference than on your system. What is going on here?

Also, in your example the ratio of real:cpu is 15:1 for nothreads. What causes that?

Interesting... thanks.

-- Scott Chapal