Hello James,

You may want to define a sortwork area. Depending on how much disk space the account you are running SAS on will depend on if you need to do this or not. In your login.com define the following:

$ define sortwork0 (some diskspace other than in your account) $ define sortwork1 ( " " " " ) $ . . .

So for example in my login I have three such sort work areas defined $ define sortwork0 monthly$:[randy] $ define sortwork1 monthly$:[randy] $ define sortwork2 monthly$:[randy]

where monthly$:[randy] is another disk (stripe set disk actually) which is different from my account. This way when SAS needs to do a sort it will use the default host sort and use the disk area monthly$:[randy] as the physical temporary space to do the sort in rather then in your regular work area.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Randy

James Redman wrote:

> I have been having a problem with sorting under Open VMS where I have > specified the SORTSIZE=64M. The message I get is 'SAS System Error' ... > 'Switching to SAS Sort'. This occurs quite late in the SAS program after > several previous sorts have worked successfully. It also happens when I am > running lots of index builds (i.e. again after lots of sorts). The program > continues for a bit further, using SAS sort instead of the HOST sort and > then finally falls over due to lack of memory. This error does not occur if > I leave the SORTSIZE down as 819200 bytes. We have seen huge performance > benefits of having a large SORTSIZE so I am anxious to find the problem and > get it fixed. > > I am running on an Alpha machine with VMS 6.2 and SAS 6.12. There is 2Gb of > memory and our quotas are through the roof (much larger than recommended by > SAS). > > I have got a call outstanding with SAS Institute but they have been unable > to replicate the problem and I was hoping that someone else running on VMS > could give it a try to prove it is not just my site. > > The easiest way would be to create a SAS file with say 100,000 obs and 30 > variables and run some SAS to create single indexes on each of the > variables. Use 'OPTIONS SORTSIZE=64M' to change the parameter. > > Any help/advice would be much appreciated. > > Cheers, > > James Redman.