Overview of SPD Server Performance Server

SAS SPD Server 5.1 provides a performance monitoring server called spdsperf. SPD Server Performance Server is an optional component and is not required for the normal operation of SPD Server.

SPD Server Performance Server gathers SPD Server process performance information and posts it to the SPD Server Management section of the SAS Management Console application. The information consists of memory and resource allocations by users, and SPD Server processes that were spawned by an SPD Server name server. All SPD Server users must connect to an SPD Server name server before their SPD Server session is spawned. Each SPD Server name server owns a dynamic family of subordinate SPD Server processes that SPD Server users and jobs create and terminate.

The information that is gathered by SPD Server Performance Server is stored in the SAS Management Console. The SAS Management Console has a folder that is reserved for SPD Server management. The SPD Management folder is a child of the Environmental Management folder in the SAS Management Console. When you expand the SPD Management folder, the next to last utility is SPD Process Profiler. Highlight the SPD Process Profiler utility to display the process information table, which contains performance summary statistics. Each row in the table provides information about a single SPD Server process that was spawned on the SPD Server name server that resides on the specified port ID (PID).

The SPD Process Profiler displays information about memory and resource allocations. For this reason, you can use the SAS Management Console to review which SPD Server processes are occupying host computing resources, how the resources are distributed across users and processes at a given point in time, and whether the resource uses and distributions are appropriate for your computing environment.

Not only can you display performance summary statistics in the SAS Management Console application. You can also configure the SPD Server Performance Server when you launch it, to create text log files that can be saved locally on the SPD Server host machine. SPD Server is shipped with a PERL utility called process_perf_log that can parse the log that SPD Server Performance Server created.