topic Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ? in Administration and Deployment

How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 19:00:12 GMT

I've migrated from SAS 9.3 to SAS 9.4 on Windows 2008 R2 servers and now want to remove/uninstall old SAS9.3 installation. I afraid that Deployment manager If I would remove some linked portion it would japerdize new system. I've searched SAS website for tips and tricks or list of files to keep, couldn't find. Please help me!

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

SASKiwi — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 02:32:02 GMT

This may be helpful:

46922 - Removing SAS® 9.3 on Microsoft Windows operating environments when you have other versions of SAS software installed on your computer

At the very least you should do a complete server backup, and verify that the backup is good prior to attempting removal. Another option might be to leave SAS 9.3 in place but disable it.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

jakarman — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 07:09:50 GMT

I would let SAs 9.3 in place just disabling it.
I a missing the notes on shared components. It is and probably will be always an issue. They are the connection to the OS level being shared by a lot of SAS components.
Once being set in the registry all newer installations are reusing that. You could have updated the shared components for the new installation in the location of the old installation.

No problem for the releases as it is intended to be able to work with newer shared versions. Only they should not get deleted when uninstalling/deleting the old release.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 06:34:41 GMT

I'd go with the other's advice. Keep the 9.3, but disable it by removing the autostart of the 9.3 metadata server, object spawner and so on.

Similar operations on real operating systems (UNIX!) are much easier and less dangerous.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:57:17 GMT

Hi All,

Thank you very much for the reply. Yes, I did disable/Manual stop to all SAS 9.3 related services (Metadata/Object Spawner etc.) and I am OK with that. Do I need to remove EG 5.1 from SASApp-Mid-tier/Metadata server? How? Does it affect system in any way?

I only thought about removing old system (SAS9.3/EG5.1) because of having issues with performance of the servers. My system is running extremely slow with only 2-4 users at a time logged-in and running moderately large jobs.

Any advise on that?

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

jakarman — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:58:23 GMT

Having data stored on hardisk does not have some serious impact on performance. Having performance issues check on CPU (availability/usage) memory (availiablity paging/swapping) IO (that is disk speed transfer rates).
Going form physical to virtualized servers you could have been hit by misperceptions on the behavior of SAS. Most likely too small buffers (IO speed) limited IO throughput (shared IO) paging swapping as having too little memory.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 06:08:23 GMT

Enterprise Guide is a client application and therefore rarely present on servers. Simply having it present does not affect performance.

You say that you experience performance problems with 2-4 users; how is the performance (related to your previous installation) with only one user?

You may have a too big value of memsize (unlimited?) in the new installation, which may cause the system to run out of memory and start paging with multiple processes.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 15:15:58 GMT

Hi Kurt,

Previous installation had same number of users. Would you please provide more details/links about memsize setup?

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 06:50:17 GMT

It's not the number of defined users, it's the number of concurrently active SAS processes.

From my experience: IBM (in conjunction with SAS) recommends to set memsize in a multiuser environment on AIX to the smallest value necessary so that the required procs / data steps can run reliably. This prevents SAS from doing too much caching on its own, and prevents the case where the system pages memory out to the paging space that actually contains file data which is already cached in the system's file cache.

Bottom line, I just wanted to give you a hint where your prblem could possibly located. It may be that someone tuned your 9.3 environment, but the same tuning steps were not done after the 9.4 installation.

How does the setup perform when only one user runs one session?

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 16:56:23 GMT

SAS Technical support provided tuning guidelines and I followed some of those steps:

Component:tomcatThreadPool : set to 500

Component: Various JDBC Resouces :Set to 256

Componebt:Atomikos transaction manager : Set to 50 (Wasn't in a list so I added this line)

2. JVM Tuning (Web Application Server):

Single server -xms4096m, -xmx4096m, -xx : permSize:1280m, xx : MaxPermSize:1280m

3. Operating system tuning: It's under process

4. SAS Web infrastructure platform data server (We don't have any database server though) : Tuned for Medium Database setup

Usually it performs faster in the morning (Even with multiple users) slows down as day progresses and worse around end of the day..Next day again same issue.

Should I change any of those values?

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 05:19:17 GMT

I'm still contemplating a memory issue. Additional processes are started during the day as different people start to work. Then the system runs out of memory and needs to swap out pages; since it is Windows, it does that to a file instead of a dedicated paging space (Windows is therefore notoriously inefficient when dealing with this situation). The heavier the memory load, the higher the pressure on the kernel to free memory pages, and while in the morning only inactive pages of code that are never used are swapped out, during the day increasingly "active" pages are put to the swap space file and cause more and more traffic there.

Look at the memsize option in the SAS configuration (sasv9.cfg) and, if not already defined, set it to a value of 256 MB (in sasv9_usermods.cfg), then check if this improves your situation. In case some memory-intensive procs start to fail, increase the value in suitable increments until everything works as you want it.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:36:06 GMT

I found almost 10-12 SASV9.cfg & 10-12 SASV9_Usermods.cfg files (One each for SASApp, ShareServer,ConnectServer,StoredProcess,PooledWorkSpace etc.). In which file I need to make change or all files?

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

jakarman — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 18:36:47 GMT

devlekhu_98 you missed the usermods config (and autoexec) at the installation part aside those of the configuration.

When going for a tuning approach:

- What is system/machine global, put it at the machine level (foundation). Think on hardware/io/network related issues

- Every appserver is having a dedicated goal, The metadataserver as an example is one of them as is the Share-server of Olap that are sharing their fucntionality for all applications.

The metadataserver should have all available memory as the database is an inmemory approach.

- Every business application could be represented by his app-server. Makes sense as the code and data of the business are thought to be part of that structure (not very logical anyway)

What is at this level configure it at that level.

- Wihtin each appserver there are the WS SP PWS (real processed start byt the objectspawner) and batch / connect directorie I would not call servers. Those batch and connect directories are only having scripts not really a service/server. For each of then all settings can be tuned according the requirements of that appserver usage and the type.

It doesn't really help to set memsize to low values as it will block functionality (sumsize and some other analytical ones) and hashing. The exception of this is sorting (sortsize) that can use all memory.

Memsize setting should be high enough not blocking functionality and that low that you prevent the quick memory thrashing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)

As you are having the new environmentmanager you should expect that one needing a lot of memory.

Caching files can be a problem associated when using big files and having limited memory resources. File Caching (Windows) As you see you turn of the filecache, it is the similar as the DIO option in Unix.
Within DBMS systems the caching is normally turned off or being limited as the DBMS is doing the caching by more dedicated design for better performance.
This is not the case with SAS as the cache is left on although SAS has buffersizing and buffernumber options.

An OS is normally designed to have isolated memory areas for the code and for the data. Although your SAS programs are of the type code they are for the OS of the type data (some with java). The result is that there is a competition for memory with code (cached) and data (system file cache). The is an issue SAS can do better, IBM is complaining about unlimted ulimit http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=tss1wp102515&aid=1

For your upgrade you are in a VM. The memory is managed by that an can be stolen (memory is shared!). This is more a likely problem for performance than the file-paging.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/mem_mgmt_perf_vsphere5.pdf There are notes on SQL server usage some common default memory settings should not be used. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/sql_server_best_practices_guide.pdf There should be something like those for SAS but cannot find those.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

SASKiwi — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 20:21:30 GMT

I think it is worth noting that with SAS 9.4 that there is much more processing being done on the mid-tier server than in 9.3. So while sharing App servers and mid-tier servers on the same VM server in 9.3 was fine for performance, now in 9.4 it is not.

You could end up spending a lot of time performance tuning but it will still probably end up being slower than 9.3. Our experience suggests that having separate mid-tier and app server VM servers gives you similar performance to 9.3 without any performance tuning.

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

devlekhu_98 — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 20:40:01 GMT

Hi SASKiwi,

That makes sense but when we asked SAS to prepare a plan file for migration, they have to let us know about these issues and recommend 3-server plan instead of just making up one!

We are suffering since 2-months with this issue. Even I was talking to SAS-tech support since last 2-3 weeks now and now they are also suggesting some serious systematic issue about sizing and asked me to contact SAS Account representative and EEC Sizing team!!

That's why I created this topic here to get insights/fine tuning solution from SAS Admin experts.

Thank you

Re: How to uninstall SAS/EG from servers SAS 9.3/EG5.1 after migrating to SAS 9.4 ?

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 07:27:56 GMT

Before you start tinkering, you need to get a picture of your configuration.

Run proc options and look at the value of MEMSIZE.

Then determine which server you and your users are connecting to; in the SMC you can find the path to the start script in the Options tab of the Workspace Server definition (Workspace Server, not Logical Workspace Server)