Date:         Fri, 28 Jun 2002 14:43:10 -0700
Reply-To:     "William W. Viergever" <wwvierg@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "William W. Viergever" <wwvierg@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:      Re: OT: For the Sort-Heads: SyncSort for Windows -- some
              preliminary #'s
Comments: To: Jack Hamilton <JackHamilton@firsthealth.com>
In-Reply-To:  <sd1c64bc.022@firsthealth.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 01:29 PM 6/28/2002 -0600, Jack Hamilton wrote:
>"William W. Viergever" <wwvierg@ATTGLOBAL.NET> wrote:
>
> >There are some options to have SyncSort provide more detail on what
> >commands were sent/processed, etc., but for now, I find the CPU
> >near-equality to be confusing -- any ideas group?
>
>My guess is that it's doing more CPU in order to figure out how to do
>less I/O.  Since I/O is usually the slowest thing you can ask your
>computer to do, it's a good tradeoff.

Agreed. Figure the 1/3 savings will go far if I want to let 3 or 4 years of
data fly at a time (these were annual Medicaid inpatient paid claims files
- w/ relevant vars only, KEEPed- after the sort, interim bills were
collapsed into single "episode" records, output if there was a transplant)



>We've seen similar effects with compressed data sets  - more use of CPU,
>but less overall elapsed time.
>
>I was going to say: If you have a way to create a virtual disk in
>memory, and lots of memory so there won't be paging, it would be
>interesting to see a comparison between Syncsort on real disk and SAS
>sort on virtual disk.

Tim Churches, IIRC, tried this on some of his machines ... Tim, r u lurking?



>  But then I realized that you're unlikely to have
>enough RAM to store 5 copies of a 900MB data set, and it wouldn't be a
>fair comparison anyway.
>
>That's what you can give me for the Unmentionable December Event: a PC
>with 6 GiB of memory.


Careful Colonel, although oblique, that's gettin' close to the Pledge of
Allegiance <vbg>

BTW, new box will have 2GB of mem .... the large RAM boxes tend to be more
geared for servers (i.e., no AGP slots for video)
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