SAS 9.3 Metadata Memory Leak

[JanKmiecicki]

Dear All,

Short description of my environment: we are using SAS 9.3 which is running on OS Windows Server 2008 R2. We have separate physical servers for SAS Metadata, Web layer and two compute nodes. Server on which SAS Metadata resides, has 12GB of RAM memory. 

Description of issue: memory leak on SAS Metadata server. I noticed that during time, consumption of memory is increasing on our SAS Metadata server. After 2 months from rebooting, memory usage reaches 100%. SAS Metadata repository consumes only 10% of available memory (~1GB) after rebooting, so it is not a lot. If we do not reboot metadata server, users can not log and use SAS tools and we can find Insufficient Memory error within log files.

As solution we implement monitoring for RAM usage and reboot SAS Metadata server every time it reaches some threshold. But I would like to find source of this issue. I have limited access and rights to metadata box but if you could provide me some tips where or what I should check, which metadata processes use memory. It seems that some process allocates memory but does not release it. I guess that it can be related to authentication process but maybe I am wrong.

Thanks for your help,

Kind Regards,

Jan Kmiecicki

[SASKiwi]

If you haven't yet done so I suggest you open a track with SAS Tech Support so they are in the best position to help you with your problem. I'm assuming you've confirmed that the SAS processes visible in Windows Task Manager are the ones consuming the memory?

Also there are a number of SAS notes on this topic but I couldn't find one specific for 9.3 under Windows.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Since you yourself have only limited permissions on the Metadata Server system, I suggest you get the responsible admins to monitor memory usage on that server on a per-process basis, so you can verify that it is actually the SAS process that eats memory.

Our metadata process is running for months at a time without any noticeable increase in memory footprint (SAS 9.2 on AIX). Basically from planned downtime to planned downtime.

I also suggest to consider switching your SAS infrastructure to a serious server operating system out of the UNIX family.