SAS EG Freeze at client

[Fairylake]

Hello,

I am running a simple program for a big table in SAS EG. The program is running for a long time, I hope to stop it, but EG just freeze there, I cannot do anything.I killed the session for EG at my pc windows 7. But when I log in the SAS server (on windows server 2012) again, the interface shows the same, still freeze.

Can someone tell me if I could stop the running program at my client end? If yes, how should i do?

Thanks a lot!

MC

[SASKiwi]

Please post your program code. Is it a SAS table you are processing or a database table? Did you try using the EG stop button? How big is the table?

[Fairylake]

Hi SASKiwi,

Thank you for your response!

the STOP button doesn't work. The table is SAS table,  several hundreds of millions of records, 9 digits. My codes should be no problem. I changed the where subset clause to be more specific (but just part of the result I need,) then I got the program completed in around 10 minutes. I guess I may need 1-2 hours to run the program.

My question is when it's running, Why I couldn't stop it?

[Fairylake]

Hello SASKiwi,

Thanks for your response!

The STOP button doesn't work. Nothing I can click on the EG interface. It's SAS table, a bit more than 600 millions of records. My program should be no problem. I changed the program a bit by subset more specific in the WHERE clause, e.g. WHERE DATE="2015-07-25", it takes around 10 minutes to complete the program. Based on this I guess I might need 1-2 hours to run my program because I need work on one week data.

The problem is not the running time, it's I can't stop it when it's running.

Thanks,

[Doc_Duke]

This link might help

http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2009/08/11/cancelling-a-sas-job-gone-awry/

[Fairylake]

Thanks for sharing the link.

In fact, I read that link before I posted.   I even couldn't go to the task status window, just nothing I can click or go in EG screen.

Anyway, I finally got my work done at midnight,  guess the server end seemed have done something, stopped my beginning submission.

[Reeza]

Not likely, you should be able to at your server end though.

[Fairylake]

Yes, I believe the server end can do. Just hope I can do something at my client end.

[TomKari]

One problem that I've encountered is that if your task is going to return a lot of report data, that can freeze EG. It's not necessarily running the SAS task that causes the problem, it could be returning the report data to your PC.

Could your task be generating multiple-megabytes of report data? If it is, find another way to accomplish your results, since a report that large won't be usable for anything anyway. You can see if this is the case by turning off all of the result type tickboxes, and running your task.

Tom

[Fairylake]

Thanks for your further exploring.

Everything is running or stored in the server end. I work with a client interface. I need to generate a much smaller table (still big ) so that I can join this "small" table with other tables, then work on a joined master table for the final results. So this work is not for report data, just prepare the necessary data table.

I agree with you, it could be the reason when SAS EG returning the result table to show up as output results.

[SASKiwi]

You could also try running your program as a batch job. If it runs in a similar time to EG you can assume that EG itself is not impacting performance. If it performs a lot faster then you can assume that EG is affecting performance in some way.

One trick I use in EG is to set the maximum number of datasets added to project to 0, as this can slow performance. However it sounds like your program is going to be slow regardless of any EG settings.

I too have found the STOP button doesn't work at times. This is particularly true if you a running a large query against a non-SAS database. Task Manager will allow you to kill EG and start over if EG wont un-freeze.

[TomKari]

In this case, if you're only creating SAS datasets, my comments about reports shouldn't apply. The only thing I can think of where this would apply is if you're accidentally creating a large amount of report data; perhaps a PROC SQL missing a NOPRINT option.

On the other hand, could you have the results of your data operation being pulled into your data grid, and too many rows being retrieved?

Another thing that I've seen take a long time with EG is opening views, since they need to be fully resolved before anything can be displayed.

Good luck, let us know what happens!

Tom