I guess there is a reason why you don't run these large jobs on the server you mention.

Performance depends on a number of things. Certainly the hardware profile is important, but so are the OS (can it use all the memory you have?), the SAS installation and configuration, and the SAS code.

Major re-engineering, and introduction of hand-coded processes a la Dorfman, often pays off, but sometimes there is low-hanging fruit in the form of relatively simple tweaks which reduce bottlenecks. It's worth a look. After all, replacement hardware may cut your 7-hour job to 2 hours. But some performance tuning of the code might do the same.

On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 12:59:46 -0500, Nick I <ni14@MAIL.COM> wrote:

>Dear SAS Experts, > >Today I have a question not about your programming skills but rather about you computer hardware skills. > >I have a computer at work with four different hard drives, about 1 Gig of RAM, Pentium 3, speed about 800 I think it is. One of my hard drives has about 200 GB of memory and the other drives anywhere from 7GB to about 20 GB. I have enough space although I'd like to have more if I can. Anyway. I have been complainig to my boss about how slow my computer is and how many hours it takes to do a PROC SORT, PROC SQL stuff, general data manipulation steps, etc. > >It is true, however, that the data sets I'm dealing with can become very large (5 Million records, 170 variables, containing Names, Addresses, SSNs, transaction data, etc.) Merging and doing SQL joints on these data sets can be quite time consuming. Sometimes it takes about 7 hrs to do an SQL query if I have other things running in batch mode. > >So my boss had just about enough of my crying and complaining. Today he said to me to just give him a proposal of what I want and he'll get it for me. (Did I say he spent close to 500K buying me a SAS server? My Christmas present !) > >That's where you come in. I'd like for you to advise me on which computer system to buy which will be extra fast and which will allow me to manipulate huge SAS data sets very quickly. (Please don't talk servers for he already bought one. I'm talking about my desktop computer.) I'd like the computer to be extra fast even when I have several (maybe 2 to 5) other process running in batch mode. (I work on multiple projects at once . . . So when one project is running I get another one started, etc.) I would also like the computer to have tons of hard disk space. Is it a good idea to have a computer with physically separate hard drives so I can maximize data manipulation times by reading from and writing to different disks? (That's what I do now with my 4 hard drives.) > >Please give me your thoughts so I can put something together and give to my boss who then will give it to . . . who then will give it to . . . > >Thanks a bunch! > >--nick >============================ > > > >-- >__________________________________________________________ >Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com >http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup