BASE SAS - Windows 7 - sas.exe has stopped working

[joemadd3n]

Hi All,

Running base on Windows 7 in batch mode, I intermittently get the windows error message "The program has stopped working" > "Close the program".

I have read through the SAS site and a suggestion was to add an env. variable;

SAS_USE_THREAD_SAFE_MEMORY = 1

This however has not resolved my issue, any ideas? This is completely intermittent.

Thanks.ow

[Kurt_Bremser]

Did the log give you any clue?

Try to use -logparms="write=immediate" on the command line or in the sasv9.cfg file that you use for batch mode, You will then see everything in the log that was done up to the crash.

[joemadd3n]

Hi Kurt,

Thanks for the tip, adding this into the command line now. I ran the code about 10 times to get it to a point where the windows error comes up, it doesn't appear to even get to the point of writing out the log.

[joemadd3n]

Another piece of information which may help, sometimes the code actually manages to write the whole log and then the windows error appears, other times it crashes at the point of execution with no log.

[Kurt_Bremser]

That is very strange. SAS not starting up at all would most likely point to something like "is not able to create work library" or "misses sasuser library" or "can't create sas.lck file". Or a limit set by the OS.

But if the process actually does (some of) its work and then crashes without log entry (usually segfaults and the like are recorded in the log), that is quite uncommon.

I don't know how good windows is at detecting this, but just to be sure I would try to verify you don't have a RAM problem (run a memory testing program to see if you have a flaky bit somewhere).

[Reeza]

I've seen this happen when the program references data on a server or is running on a remote server and there's sometimes a server disconnect that occurs, any chance something like that is happening?

[joemadd3n]

Thanks for your comments.

I've run a memory check which is inconclusive, no errors found.

Trying to strip it back as much as I can to remove any "external" factors that could be affecting it.

We had no issues on Windows XP with 9.2, since moving to Windows 7 this has started, I have tried 2 different machines, but that's not to see that it's nothing to do with the business' build they deployed, this could be causing the issue.

[Kurt_Bremser]

The next step would be to get a windows expert involved who looks at the system logs of windows itself. Crashed processes should usually leave a mark in the system.