Though there are countless possibilities, let me assume theres a good chance that a) its the EG Client b) the network c) the SAS server.
If its the box that the EG client is on that is having problems, then its up to the wintel administrator to take a look at it. I found rather useful tips from Chris' SAS for dummies book on the subject. Some of the recommended tools from sysinternals are helpful for troubleshooting on the wintel box. I'd look at the syslogs, the cpu usage, the memory usage and the I/O behavior. These are the tools I've been experimenting with (which you might also find helpful): process explorer, process monitor, autoruns.exe, regmon.exe and tcpview.exe (all from sysinternals).
If its the network, then you probably want to get your network administrator to come in and make some analysis. A packet analysis is not necessarily helpful, but it will reveal alot about what the application is doing at the network layer. Wireshark is a great tool for end point analysis on the EG client. If the traffic tranverses a segment to another before it reaches the server, try running two concurrent sessions on each segment (time display format to: Time of Day instead of seconds since beginning of capture). This allows you to compare the traffic before and after the firewall (especially if its a botched up firewall rule)
If the SAS server is slow, you'd probably want to use STIMER, FULLSTIMER & ARM to find out why each step takes ages. some of the traditional unix tools might be available if its on a unix platform (e.g. top, vmstat, iostat, iotop for solaris 10, dtrace, gdb, etc). I dont know much about SAS but my impression is that its typically I/O that kills you. I also wonder if a badly dimensioned SASWORK and SASLIBRARY might cause the system to slow down to such a state.
Given that we have more queries regarding administration and troubleshooting, I'd like to suggest to the forum administrators that we should have a discussion forum on the subject of enterprise administration and business intelligence platform
Message was edited by: Joshua