SAS Application Server - time to open

[androo]

Hi.

I was a bit curious on how performant our SAS installation is.
for instance, it takes over a minute when listing the contents on the application server for the first time.
Is this normal?

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi @androo ,

that is always a very good and fair question.

I think the question about being "normal" is tricky. It might mean if this is expected or if this is common behavior across other SAS installations or if this is what you (or another peer user) want and expect.

1- For the last one, clearly the answer would be "no", since one wants to connect asap, and this can be, by studies, anytime between 5 and 15 seconds.

2- For the first two I would say: it depends. And this I will explain a bit further.

That slowness could be happening due to different reasons. Could be a design issue, a network issue or just based on how your community of users use that SASApp.

Let's start with the last one, since you might be more in control of that one:

Any connection slowness due to usage normally point to either autoexec pre-processing, to metadata libraries assingment and/or a large number of files/folder in your SASApp root folder.

A long autoexec execution will add time on every spawned Workspace server (your SASApp). This you or your SAS admin could test by just executing the related WorkspaceServer.bat/sh file on the SAS server.

A large number of libraries assignments on the metadata and/or with a large list of datasets, can create slowness as well since EG will query on "conversation mode" both the metadata and the workspace server, to list them on your EG session in the LIbraries section. And for the exact same reason, a large number of files and folder on your SASApp root can cause slowness too, since it will list them under the Files section.

There are other causes that you might less in control, more technical, and you will definitely need your SAS Admin in those cases. Some examples:

- You have SAS App grid enabled or load balanced, and there is something in that configuration that requires fine tuning.

- Your list of Active Directory groups is too large, or the latency to Active Directory from your EG or server are larger than 1 millisecond, so the slowness might be caused by slow authentications, and EG-SASApp requires many authentications.

- Sometimes, network and firewalls can cause that kind of issue as well, but these are usually harder to troubleshoot and resolve.

[Kurt_Bremser]

If you use encrypted metadata-bound libraries, and either pre-assign them through metadata or the autoexec file, then these cause a lot of back-and-forth between the workspace and metadata server during initialization. We experienced the same.