on Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 12:18:16PM -0700, Phil Rack (philrack@MINEQUEST.COM) wrote: > SAS-L'rs > > I was wondering... if I was using a Win2K Workstation with dual processors and > had two local SAS sessions running, would SAS (or the OS) be smart enough to > use both processors for each SAS job?

Under an SMP Win2K system, a given thread can run on any available processor, and if my understanig is correct, may alternate among available processors if necessary, though its affinitiy is for the processor it ran on most recently. Whether or not a given SAS process will span multiple processors depends on SAS's threading model. I'm not familiar with specifics though the annual SI SUGI Windows presentation may cover this.

More significantly, you should pop open the Performance Monitor and watch your system's use of I/O, memory, and processor utilization. I suspect you'd benefit far more from additional spindles (eg: RAIDed disk subsystem) than from more processors, unless you're performing CPU intensive taks (some statistics and IML procedures will do this).

For more information, see: http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/w2kperf/chapter/ch05.html

-- Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one...