topic Re: MEMSIZE hardware limit in SAS Programming

MEMSIZE hardware limit

Haris — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 20:15:20 GMT

I set my MEMSIZE to MEMSIZE=MAX on a Windows LOCAL server with 32GB of RAM and almost 300GB free on the primary system SSD.

However, DATA step with hash objects terminates when virtual memory file reaches 57GB. Why is that? Is that a hardware limit or can virtual memory not exceed two times the RAM? What else can I do to increase the size of available virtual memory? I am only dealing with a 3GB dataset of 1M records. That's not that big.

I have much more space than 57GB on the primary SSD and, additionally, I have a 4TB secondary HD on the system.

Thank you in advance.

Re: MEMSIZE hardware limit

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 20:34:21 GMT

Apart from the memory issue, I think that a hash object that forces paging defeats its purpose of avoiding I/O.

Re: MEMSIZE hardware limit

Haris — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 21:54:53 GMT

I know, Kurt. The question is not about Hash Objects, though.

I think I figured out the source of the limit. It was the Windows Virtual Memory setting which, by default is equal to the RAM size. In my case 32GB of RAM was matched to 33GB of Virtual Memory auto-allocated by Windows. That's about 64GB, of which, 57GB was available to SAS.

Re: MEMSIZE hardware limit

Ksharp — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 10:51:28 GMT

Try -memsize 0 .

and run

proc options option=memsize;run;

to check the available memory size assigned for sas.

Re: MEMSIZE hardware limit

Haris — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 13:07:15 GMT

My understanding of documentation is that MEMSIZE=0 and MEMSIZE=MAX are equivalent, no?