Date:         Wed, 29 Mar 2006 12:48:38 -0800
Reply-To:     "Pardee, Roy" <pardee.r@GHC.ORG>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Pardee, Roy" <pardee.r@GHC.ORG>
Subject:      Re: SAS utilizing a small fraction of system resources
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

That's funny--not many of my sas programs are cpu-intensive.  For me the
bottlneck is always i/o.  I'm usually doing medium-bore data
wrangling...  I reckon if I was doing lots of statistical analysis it'd
be the other way around.

-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Charles Harbour
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:32 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: SAS utilizing a small fraction of system resources

Sas is generally a single-threaded application.  Are you running
multiple jobs in a single session?  If you have multiple users running
multiple sessions, you ought to be able to run against the entire
machine (maybe something in the OS is limiting sas to one cpu?).  But if
you're running single jobs from a single session, you're only going to
go as fast as one of the processors will let you go.

Having said that, there are other ways to take advantage of the multiple
processors through multi-threading (things like sorting).  While you
wait on the sysadmin types to respond to this posting, you can look
through the sas support website--they have several examples on how to
get the most out of your hardware.

Your complaint is unusual--most of us crab about how sas consumes all
resources available, not the other way around....

You might also give us some details on what it is you're doing with your
data--if you're sorting a file 'in place', then you're going to be
limited to how fast you can do I/O--where cpu has little impact.

HTH,
CH

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:26:00 -0600, Robert Citek
<rwcitek@ALUM.CALBERKELEY.ORG> wrote:

>On Mar 29, 2006, at 10:42 AM, toby dunn wrote:
>> Sounds like you have some settings set wrong, step one is run proc
>> options; run ;
>>
>> It will dump the current settings to your log for you to look over.
>
>Here's a simplified transcript of what I did:
>
>$ cat options.sas
>options linesize=256 nodate pagesize=32767 ; proc options ; run ; quit
>;
>
>$ sas options.sas
>
>$ grep -c '^ [A-Z]' options.log
>308
>
>I've looked over the ~300 option and nothing obvious stands out as
>being wrong.  For example:
>
>CPUCOUNT=4 Number of processors available.
>SPDEINDEXSORTSIZE=33554432 Identifies memory to be used for SPDE
>asynchronous index create or append SPDEMAXTHREADS=0  Maximum number of

>threads for SPDE processing
>SPDESORTSIZE=33554432 Memory for SPDE sort operations
>MEMMAXSZ=2147483648 Maximum amount of memory allocated to support
>MEMLIB and MEMCACHE options.
>MEMSIZE=4294967295 Specifies the limit on the total amount of memory to

>be used by the SAS System
>
>The numbers that seem low are the SPDE* options.  What other options
>should I be looking at?  Should I post the options.log?
>
>Still working on creating a small test case.
>
>FWIW, the above was run in a bash shell under Cygwin under Windows
>2003 Server.
>
>Regards,
>- Robert
>http://www.cwelug.org/downloads
>Help others get OpenSource software.  Distribute FLOSS for Windows,
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