Enterprise Guide 8: Big sgplot Scatter Plot causing guide to crash

[TimCampbell]

Hi everyone,

One of my team discovered this today. 

We have some code that ends up creating a scatter plot of a large amount of data (don't ask why!) which worked fine on EG 7.15 but causes EG 8.1 to hang, chew up loads of RAM on the desktop and can only stop by crashing out.

Some example code is below. Running for i = 1 to 1000 will work fine but if we go up to 20,000 records EG get's itself stuck.

(our dataset has 24,000 records and plots fine on EG 7.15)

Has anyone else come across this issue or are you able to replicate it? Not sure if it's a problem with our environment or something else?

Using proc gplot through the EG tasks did produce the chart on EG 8.1 so it might just be an SGPLOT issue but i'd rather not go through updating all our code to use different procedures. 

Thanks for your help,

Tim

data Random_data;
	do i = 1 to 10000;
		x=rand("Normal");
		y=rand("Normal");
		output;
	end;
run;

proc sgplot data=Random_data;
	scatter y=y x=x;
	xaxis grid minor minorcount=4 ;
	yaxis grid;
run;

[SASKiwi]

I would raise this issue with SAS Tech Support. EG 8.1 is pretty new and is a major change from earlier EG versions. Tracking the problem will enable SAS to diagnose and fix it.

I tried your test program with 20,0000 values and it worked OK in EG 8.1 64-bit. Are you using the 32-bit or 64-bit version?

I've already found a different problem myself with EG 8.1 and PROC COMPARE that SAS are investigating.

[CaseySmith]

Hi @TimCampbell,

I agree with @SASKiwi that this would be a good one to report to SAS Tech Support.  I wonder though if this is related to the new default results format in EG 8.1.  EG 8.1 uses the ODS HTML5 destination as the default results format (consistent with SAS Studio) while previous versions of EG used SAS Report by default.  You could test this theory by unchecking HTML and checking SAS Report in EG's Tools->Options->Results->General->Results Formats, and then re-run your code and see if you can still reproduce.

Casey

[TimCampbell]

Thanks both,

I've raised it with tech support and will post here if they find a fix for it.

HTML and SAS report both work fine on EG 7.15.

Switching the output to SAS report rather than HTML did work in EG 8.1 too so I will get my team to do that for now.

Tim

[TimCampbell · Accepted solution]

Update from SAS tech support.

They can replicate the bug when running EG against servers running SAS 9.4 M3 but not when running on 9.4 M6.

Looks like when we do the upgrade to M6 (planned for later this month anyway!) it should be fine.

[SASKiwi]

Interesting that I ran your test program on SAS 9.4 M2 and it worked OK.

[CaseySmith]

I'm glad switching the results format (ex. to SAS Report) is a reasonable workaround for now.

Note: The HTML results format in EG 7.15 used the ODS HTML/HTML4 destination.  EG 8.1 uses ODS HTML5 by default.  I suspect the issue is specific to ODS HTML5.  So, another workaround (if you prefer to stick with html) may be to use HTML4 instead of HTML5 in EG 8.1 (select "Use HTML" radio button, instead of "Use HTML5", in EG's Tools->Options->Results->HTML).  In other words, I have a feeling using any results format other than HTML5 would avoid the issue.

Casey