This article describes the different performance-type issues that you might encounter with SAS Marketing Automation and the possible workarounds for those problems.
Performance concerns can include the following types of issues:
- noticeable slowness in the environment
- inability to create a campaign
- tasks that no longer work or run extremely slowly
- users not being able to log on
- processes not responding
- no responses when you click something in the user interface (UI)
- tasks that stop responding or do not recover
Workarounds
The following workarounds are an excellent defense and go a long way in preventive maintenance:
- Routinely stop all SAS services and clean up the logging. See the Creating Space on the Mid-Tier section for more details.
- To make sure that your environment is set for optimal performance, see SAS Note 60773, “Configuring SAS® Pooled Workspace and SAS® Stored Process servers for optimal performance with SAS® Customer Intelligence.”
- To understand the settings that are used to optimally configure the SAS Pooled Workspace Servers and SAS Stored Process Servers for use with SAS® Customer Intelligence, see SAS SAS Note 40567, “Troubleshooting and tuning SAS® Stored Process Server and SAS® Pooled Workspace Server load balancing for SAS® Marketing Automation releases.”
- Check the space on your environments regularly.
- Make sure that you are current with the latest hot fixes for your software—not just the ones for SAS Customer Intelligence. The hot-fix blogs are a good reference to help with the hot-fix process and generating a report. The report provides a visual of what is needed on all tiers:
- When performance is degraded, check which jobs are running on the system to determine whether you need to adjust the time that your jobs run. (For example, consider not running jobs during high-traffic times.)
- Make sure that when you stop services, there are no stray processes left behind. See SAS Note 57013, “Load-balancing problems can occur if a SAS® Stored Process Server process fails to start” for more details.
- Keep a list of changes in your environment and the load on your system. This list can help you determine whether those changes added to recent performance changes.
Creating Space on the Mid-Tier
To clean up so that you have more space on the mid-tier, complete the following steps:
- Stop the middle-tier components first. (For example, stop SASServerX_Y – WebAppServer first, then httpd-Web Server, then Cache Locator, and then JMS Broker.)
On Linux, use the following script to stop the SAS Services:
sas.servers status
sas.servers stop
- Delete, move, or archive to a different path, the content of the following directories:
- <SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/WebAppServer/SASServerX_Y/temp/* (these temporary files do not need to be backed up)
- <SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/WebServer/logs/*
- <SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/gemfire/instances/ins_41415/*.log, *.dat
- <SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/activemq/data/*
Note: Delete only the content inside the data folder. If you delete the "data folder," you will not be able to start the service.
All the files you see in <SAS-configuration-directory>//Lev1/Web/activemq/data/* will be regenerated after the restart.
- <SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/Logs/SASServerX_Y/*
In the directories above, the X and Y in SASServerX_Y represent the different servers that you might have (that is SASServer1_1, SASServer6_1, and so on).
- Start the following middle-tier components again:
sas.servers status
sas.servers start
- See Using the sas.servers Script on UNIX or z/OS to Start or Stop All Servers for additional information.
Additional Debugging
Note that this section is not for regular errors that you might see in the GUI.
To determine whether additional debugging is necessary, consider the following questions:
- Have issues started taking a longer amount of time to run over time?
- Are you restarting the middle-tier services more often than normal due to a performance issue?
- Are you experiencing continued slowness that the cleanup from the previous section does not circumvent?
If you still experience issues similar to the ones above, enable garbage collection on SASServer1_1 and SASServer6_1 by following the instructions listed in https://support.sas.com/kb/59/508.html , “Enabling garbage-collection logging for SAS® 9.4 Environments.”
Note: When you enable garbage collection, the size of the logs increases. Before enabling garbage collection, make sure that you have enough space.
Once you enable garbage collection, run a campaign and reproduce the performance concern. Then, open a track with SAS Technical Support and provide the following information:
- the setenv.sh file for SASServer1_1 and SASServer6_1 on the middle-tier machine in the following locations:
<SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/WebAppServer/SASServer1_1/bin
<SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/WebAppServer/SASServer6_1/bin
- the SASCustIntelCore6.6.log file on the middle-tier machine in the following location:
<SAS-configuration-directory>/Lev1/Web/Logs/SASServer6_1/
- verbose GC logs for SASServer1 and SASServer6 on the middle-tier machine in the following location:
<SAS-configuration-directory>/LevN\Web\Logs\gc*.log
- the name of the campaign that you ran along with the campaign code
- the time that the campaign started and the time that the campaign finished
- who ran the campaign
