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snlbse
SAS Employee

Hello everyone,

I'm running into performance issues on a new 9.3 (yes, I know) environment of a customer of ours. Their migrated EG projects are running just fine and without any errors, but they take about 3 times longer than they used to.

In both cases (old and new environment) the customer uses Enterprise Guide 5.1 to open a project and run it on the SASApp server. The data used is stored locally on the Compute tier that hosts the SASApp server.

Workspace Server, Object Spawner and Metadata Server log files all report no problems.

I'm looking for some useful tips to troubleshoot the performance issue. If anyone could help, I'd be much obliged.

This is what I've determined so far, using a test project that exists on both environments:

- In the new enviroment, the task status often reports "Waiting on server", while in the old environment it just says "Running..." all the time.

- Between each step of the project in the new environment, you see "Connecting to server" flashing by. It's very fast but I haven't seen that message in the old environment.

- In both environments the option to uses parallel execution on the same server is turned off. When turning it on, it does seem to improve performance, but the projects really aren't built in a way to properly use parallel processing.

It somehow feels like it tries to reconnect to the server between every step in the project. Could this be the case and if so, where can I find more information on it?

Anyway, like I said: any help would be much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Bram Seldenthuis

SAS Application Maintenance

3 REPLIES 3
LinusH
Tourmaline | Level 20

To rule out the possibility that the new environment (SAS server) isn't slower, you need to compare the SAS logs from each environment. I assume that the underlying data is close to identical to make it comparable.

Data never sleeps
ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager

Bram,

You should work with SAS Tech Support on this. They can instruct you about how to gather more information from your project runs and then help with interpreting this.

Also, you might be interested to try the Project Reviewer task, which can add some additional insight as to what tasks take the longest.

Other things to check: how long does it take to initialize the SAS workspace server?  You can check the initialization log from within EG.  Does the SAS Workspace connect to a number of defined libraries?  These might bog things down.

And is your SAS 9.3 environment a SAS Grid environment?  If configured to do so, EG would submit each task to a different grid node -- great for load balancing, but might add some overhead.

Chris

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snlbse
SAS Employee

First off: thanks for replying so quickly. I am a bit further now in my analysis of what's going wrong. I've found that Enterprise Guide isn't the culprit here. It's the whole environment.

I've run a couple of SAS programs that are designed to stress the system a little and record things like I/O throughput and elapsed runtimes, while building very large data sets with between 10 million and 380 million records.

The old environment is roughly twice as fast as the new one in both runtimes and throughput in MB/s.

I'm going to run some additional checks to figure out exactly what is the bottleneck.

Again, thanks for your help.

Bram

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