topic Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program in SAS Programming

Determining memory needed for SAS program

supp — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 20:49:43 GMT

Hello community, I am running SAS 9.4 programs via a Grid in linux. Is there a way to determine how much memory a program needs to run?

In our shop we allocate around 5gb of memory to our testing environment but only about 2gb of memory in our production environment. This has led to jobs failing in prod because of insufficient memory even though it ran fine in test.

I know we can use the getoption('xmrlmem') to see how much memory is available for the job. But is there a way to see how memory a program actually used?

I would like to know ahead of time if I need to allocate more memory in prod for a program to run.

Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program

SASKiwi — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 21:01:12 GMT

You can't calculate SAS memory usage in advance, but if you add the SAS option FULLSTIMER, SAS will report memory usage in the log.

options fullstimer;

Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program

supp — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 21:07:35 GMT

Thanks @SASKiwi, my understanding of the fullstimer option is it will provide expanded detail, including memory usage, for each step in the program. If I wanted to estimate total memory usage for the program would I just add each steps memory usage to get a total?

Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program

SASKiwi — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 21:12:05 GMT

No, memory usage for a program would be the maximum memory across all steps. SAS program steps process sequentially so only the step using the most memory is relevant.

Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program

Reeza — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 21:54:26 GMT

It also depends what procedures you use. Some aren't affected by memory and others such as statistical procedures can be very memory dependent.

5GB of memory is low though....usually the standard these days is 16GB for any work I've done lately.

Re: Determining memory needed for SAS program

SASKiwi — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:38:05 GMT

Also 2GB is way too low for a Production environment - ours is set to 8GB currently.