Date:         Fri, 20 Jun 2003 06:20:02 GMT
Reply-To:     Mark AC Emmett <markacemmett@AOL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Mark AC Emmett <markacemmett@AOL.COM>
Organization: AOL, http://www.aol.co.uk
Subject:      Re: How to speed up a SAS process?

As I understand it tagsort actually increases the time taken to sort a data
set.  What tagsort does is to minimise the use of the hard disk space - when
you use a normal proc sort SAS needs to use between 3 and 4 times the size of
the data set as a temporary area on the hard drive - tagsort minimises this if
you are short of space.

The best way to speed up the sorting process is to tell SAS how much RAM it can
use for sorting, I use 1/3 of my RAM which is 340MB, so I tell SAS this by:

proc sort data = temp sortsize=340M;