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