Enable parallel processing on sas 9.3 portable

[piyushdwij]

Hi , i am using sas 9.3 portable version on windows 7 32 bit intel i5 processor ( 4 cores )  , i need to enable parallel processing to harness rest of the core , its using only one.

[LinusH · Accepted solution]

"Portable" is not a SAS edition that I know of, so I just asume you are working with Base/Foundation.

Submit:

proc options group=performance;

run;

Check the options threads and cpucount. In your case, it should default to THREADS and CPUCOUNT=4.

Not all SAS processing uses threads. Sorting, aggregation by SQL and some procs uses threads.

[piyushdwij]

ok ,i just ran that code and yes it has threads and cpu count 4 , but that does not help me as when i am working with a dataset that has 400,000+ records the proc SQL taking more than 2 hours to complete and during that time resource manager shows only one CPU in full use rest  3 are idle. ho can i speed up things from here ?

[piyushdwij]

found out how to specify threads option in proc SQL .

[LinusH]

Can't see that would make any difference in your case, or did it?
Share your SQL, if it doesn't contain much sorting/aggregation it will be single threaded a part of its process time.
If you are running on a laptop chances are that you have i/o or memory constraints. Submit:

Options fullstimer msglevel =i;

To get more information in the log on what's going on.

[piyushdwij]

yes , it did not make any difference. 😞

[SimonWilliams]

Hi piyushdwij,

As LinusH already mentioned you may have an I/O bottleneck. Does laptop have seperate drives or paritions to manage your permanent and temporary SAS datasets? Having seperate disks for permanent and temporary datasets can help speed up the processing.

In addition if you are accessing an MS SQL Server (presumably not on the same machine that you have SAS on) and you are submitting SQL code, why not submit explicit MS SQL server code and have SQL server do the processing for you?

Without seing your code i don't think there is much more that i can add.

One final thought. This sounds more like a data management question so you may want to post this to: https://communities.sas.com/t5/Data-Management/ct-p/data_management

Cheers, Simon