topic Re: A Good News ... and WHY? in SAS Programming

A Good News ... and WHY?

hellohere — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:49:00 GMT

Using X command inside SAS to unzip big files in PC/Windows, and find the unzip speed is much faster than WinRAR(double click, default).

SAS takes less than 3 Min. and WinRAR takes 10+Min.

Anyone knows why?

Also one big holdback in SAS is that complicate process needs take many data steps which consume much. Anyone knows how to speed that up?!

Re: A Good News ... and WHY?

Reeza — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 01:02:15 GMT

@hellohere wrote:

Also one big holdback in SAS is that complicate process needs take many data steps which consume much. Anyone knows how to speed that up?!

Reduce multiple reads of the data by loading it into RAM if possible - lookup the SASFILE statement.

Reduce multiple reads of the data by ensuring that as many steps are combined as possible.

Use PROCS when available as they're more optimized.

Otherwise, a variety of papers on the topic here:

https://www.lexjansen.com/search/searchresults.php?q=speed%20up%20your%20code

Re: A Good News ... and WHY?

SASKiwi — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 05:39:22 GMT

"Using X command inside SAS to unzip big files in PC/Windows, and find the unzip speed is much faster than WinRAR(double click, default).

SAS takes less than 3 Min. and WinRAR takes 10+Min."

If you are using a remote SAS server the X command will execute on the SAS server, while a double-click in Windows Explorer will execute on your PC even if the results get saved back to your SAS server. This most likely explains why it is so much slower.

Re: A Good News ... and WHY?

Ksharp — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 06:40:24 GMT

For your second question, try SAS/IML code it is in-memory analysis . @Rick_SAS talk about this issue before .

Re: A Good News ... and WHY?

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 07:35:41 GMT

Let us see code examples for the steps that take so much time, there is (almost) always opportunity for performance tuning.

Which unzip program do you use in the X statement?