Multiple UTILLOC and WORK Libraries for IO balancing on Win7 64 bits with SAS 9.4 TS1m3

[astrae_research]

Dear all,

How do you edit your .cfgs to balance the load for UTILLOC and WORK librefs on 2 NVME drives?

HEre are my lines from sasv9.cfg

-UTILLOC ('d:\SAS UTILITY FILES','e:\SAS UTILITY FILES')

-WORK "e:\SAS94\SASFoundation\9.4\nls\en\work_list.txt"

Here is my work_list.txt following http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/hostwin/69955/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1qr5dmzagn9krn1lt...

/d/SAS_TEMP
/e/SAS_TEMP
    Method=Random

SAS loaded through EG just freezes until i remove these lines. The folders exist and everything else works ok. If i just specify one UTILLOC and and only one work lib, and run a whole bunch of sorting with 10 gigs datasets, the code runs a minute but it never writes any util files to the UTILLOC (verified through res monitor) it just creates a few 0 size files in that location. I really wish there were more documentation on these features. I have a terabytes big project and this optimization will save time.

Thank you

[Kurt_Bremser]

I'd rather use one volume striped over those two disks, and use the one resulting path for WORK. To further speed things up, use a similar stripeset for UTILLOC. That's what I did for a long time with LVM on AIX, and it served me well. Nowadays, the SAN storage is fast enough to handle all I/O (WORK and permanent).

[astrae_research]

Thank you for the answer! Unfortunately, there is no budget (or time to research other options) for anything else so I'm looking for a quick and dirty way to make things work.

I corrected the file (just trial and error, love the sas doc) and now SAS loads but only uses one folder for WORK and never the other.

Thsi is the file now

"d:\SAS_TEMP"
"e:\SAS_TEMP"
    Method=Random

[Kurt_Bremser]

SAS uses both drives sequentially, so you won't get any load balancing out of that.

Combine the two drives into a stripeset and use that for WORK.

[astrae_research]

Ok, so I misunderstood the doc. Would software striping done in Win 7 x64 do?

[Kurt_Bremser]

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@astrae_research wrote:

Ok, so I misunderstood the doc. Would software striping done in Win 7 x64 do?

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I would try that.