Improve performance of SAS on Windows 10

[kleinhev]

This is not a question but a suggestion to dramatically speed up SAS (9.4 64bit TS1M3) on Windows 10 64bit:

If you run a longer SAS program (eg proc sort) on Windows 10, Windows' task manager (%windir%\system32\taskmgr.exe) will likely show high CPU and Memory usage of "Antimalware Service Executable: Windows Defender Antivirus Service"

Now do the following:

- Open Windows Defender > Virus & Threat protection settings > Exlusions

- Add "Process": C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\sas.exe

and watch how CPU and Memory usage of "Antimalware Service Executable: Windows Defender Antivirus Service" decreases and the performance of SAS increases. On my system, this setting increased speed of SAS (datasteps and proc sort) 10 times.

[RW9]

Until such time as malware alters sas.exe based on on your exclusion list.  Me, I would be very cautious about altering these types of setups.

[Kurt_Bremser]

There's a much better solution: can the toyboxes and use a real operating system. Then you don't need all kinds of protection against dangers that are the results of sloppy design by people who had no clue, but a deadline.

[ronan]

Hello,

If you want to ask SAS for any improvements, please feel free to post your feedback into

the "SASware ballot Ideas" community. SAS listens, duly answers & even implements eventually 😉 : I speak out of experience.

Menu List "Find a Community" > SASware ballot Ideas

For your particular concern, from my point of view, this is quite independent from SAS or any file-based PC tool

you might be working with on you PC.I remember the same sort of issues 10 years ago for Window XP/Windows 2003 and another antivirus. Those antivirus sometimes run (purposely) intrusive request at such low level as "I/O transaction" level, meaning every time your SAS session writes or reads a file portion stored on disk (list of blocks). 

Updating the antivirus exclusion list with  SAS PC executable "sas.exe" or SAS table filenames extension (*.sas7bdat, *.sas7butl etc.) is sometimes mandatory to disable this behaviour and reclaim SAS full speed !

[texasmfp]

Thanks for posting.  This cut my runtime by 2/3rds!