topic Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding in SAS Programming

SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 18:51:43 GMT

Hi guys,

since last month my SAS 9.4 is extremely slow, the initialization is taking a whole life, when a ask to open a table (even a table with two rows and two columns) doesn't take less than 3min, the WRDS remote access is slow too.

Does anybody know if something happened lately or any reason for this change on my SAS performance?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

Reeza — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:56:26 GMT

WRDS is running on Wharton's servers, so you likely need to talk to them about speed issues. They do have support.

What type of SAS installation do you have? Are you using SAS UE running locally, or SAS Studio and using your schools SAS server? Or some other type of installation?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

SASKiwi — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 21:00:07 GMT

Is this a local SAS installation (on your PC) or are you connecting to a remote SAS server? If it is local then check Windows Task Manager. What does it show in terms of CPU usage and memory usage? Also check free space on your hard drive - do you have plenty of free space?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:18:26 GMT

I don't believe is a problem with WRDS because the remote tasks are performing very fast. The problem is when I thy to login, the SAS is taking a long time to answer my request to login.

It's a SAS 9.4v with a University License installed in my laptop.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:24:00 GMT

It's a local SAS installation.

When SAS was trying to login at my WRDS account it was using 0% of my CPU ans 37MB of my memory.

My laptop has 414GB free memory and a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4210U 1.70Ghz CPU.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

Reeza — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:50:46 GMT

When SAS was trying to login at my WRDS account it was using 0% of my CPU ans 37MB of my memory.

That still sounds like the SAS server at WRDS taking time to load, not SAS 9.4

Or are you referring to when you start up the application before you try to log in to WRDS? That would then be part of your local installation issue. If that's the case I would check what updates have been applied in the past month and if you have the latest version of SAS (9.4 TS1M5) which your University should have access to free of cost.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:56:00 GMT

But it's not just when I try to login at WRDS. It also happens when I try to open tables, no matter the table size, the initialization is taking forever too.

My SAS is a SAS 9.4 TS Level 1M4.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

Reeza — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:29:06 GMT

Are those tables on your server or the WRDS server? Did you download the data from WRDS and are trying to work with it locally?

What's the library reference for them?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

Reeza — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:30:19 GMT

FYI - anything with WRDS is going over your internet connection lines. If you've been doing a lot of work with these data sets, and they can be big, in terms of downloading them you may have exceeded your usage limits and are having your speeds throttled by your ISP.

Any other slowdowns with internet streaming devices or issues?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 02:20:33 GMT

The tables are on my laptop. Even tables with 2 rows are taking more than 5min to open.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

ChrisNZ — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 04:48:57 GMT

Does your local SAS session have an autoexec file?

Does this file contain references to a remote server (libraries not on the C: drive , signon)?

Does your local config file reference remote locations for some files (like macro libraries?

What happens when you start your local SAS session with no network connection?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

error_prone — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 07:34:35 GMT

Have to updated SAS UE? Could be a problem with the latest update. Sometimes a fresh download helps.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 15:57:25 GMT

Does your local SAS session have an autoexec file?

A: I don't know where to look at for it.

Does this file contain references to a remote server (libraries not on the C: drive , signon)?

A: No, my libraries are at my C: drive.

Does your local config file reference remote locations for some files (like macro libraries?

What happens when you start your local SAS session with no network connection?

It's much faster without internet. Why is that happening?

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

ChrisNZ — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 20:54:49 GMT

Your local SAS session references some remote resources on a very slow link.

You have to find out what is referenced.

You could run proc options and look for remote paths.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 20:56:45 GMT

Thank you!

How can I do that? I have never used proc options before.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

ChrisNZ — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:27:27 GMT

It's a complex syntax, brace yourself.

 proc options; run;

Then check the log.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

nadiacm — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:29:03 GMT

hahaha thank you.

Re: SAS 9.4 Very slow or not responding

sxg1 — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 13:49:43 GMT

I just ran into a similar problem with slow initialization of SAS/Windows running on Windows 10. We just had a set of Win 10 updates applied. I'm running SAS 9.4 M4, 32-bit.

I found this discussion on Communities and it solved my problem.

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Procedures/slow-initialization/td-p/245136#

It required editing the .cfg file and adding the option -NOPRNGETLIST.

Hope it works for you.