Solving SAS Performance Problems: Employing Host-Based Tools, a paper presented at SUGI 31 (2006) by Tony Brown of the SAS Performance Lab, is available here:

  http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/papers/practicalperf.pdf

This paper discusses an iterative, disciplined approach to diagnose performance problems with the SAS System on Unix and Windows systems. It details the employment and interpretation of the most commonly available host-based performance monitors, to help understand what resource bottlenecks existed during the job run. It also details how to overlay this information with SAS logs to reconcile episodes of bad performance on the host and storage systems to the SAS job steps. This process can help identify the performance restraints with SAS processes, and in doing so, lead to their quick resolution.

The paper includes attachments that contain a log information macro that can be used for all operating environments. In addition, there are attachments that contain individual monitoring scripts for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris. For your convenience, these scripts are also available from the FTP site:

  http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/unix/AllScripts.zip

Performance monitoring for Windows is discussed in the text of the paper.

Operating System and Release Information