Thank you @ChrisHemedinger for taking your time to reply. Really appreciate it. I see your points and making sure you write to a fast location makes absolute sense. Supporting that is the observation that shifting the MFILE target, via the FILENAME statement, to DUMMY from TEMP removes any performance difference. However, as a layman not knowing too much about the behind-the-scenes-stuff… I'm not buying it. 😊 I think there is a problem with the MFILE implementation. Reason being, that if I run this script in my work environment in batch, having set the location of the MFILE file to the exact same folder location as the .log file, you still see huge differences. And we must bear in mind that SAS, because of the MPRINT, writes character for character the exact same content to the log and to the MFILE target. But enabling MFILE, as the only difference, slows the process down enormously. And to me, that behavior make no sense, and I doubt that is the intention of the MFILE implementation. I have also placed the MFILE target in WORK, but the performance is exactly the same as with using TEMP on FILENAME. That is expected, I guess, as the TEMP location points basically to the same location as WORK. I tested in SODA to see whether what I observed in my work environment was linked to the setup at work or not. The results points to that it wasn’t but rather it points to the MFILE implementation being the culprit. Note: As a whole the SODA setup is so much faster than SAS at work, niiice, and less impacted by MFILE. I had hoped raising a ticket in the SODA environment would have been taken a bit better care of, but I’ll now make sure to push it through the work channels as well.
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