SAS Life Science Analytics Framework 5.4 introduces a new feature called Job Health Status.

Job Health Status indicates whether a job is current or needs to be executed because the job might no longer be current due to changes to input files, output files, program files, or the job itself since the job was last executed.

Job associations are obtained from the job definition. Any changes to the associated files or the job itself trigger a stale health status and subsequently result in a stale job. A stale job is identified by a blue border around the standard job icon.

Note that the files in a job input folder share a relationship with all the jobs that use that specific folder for input. As a result, if you update a file in the folder, the relationship data is used to flag all related jobs as stale. 

Depending on how you set up your jobs, a scenario can very easily develop where output folders do the following:

• also become input folders
• become included in jobs where they are not necessarily needed
• are updated every few minutes and end up triggering and designating every job in the system as stale

Scenarios such as the one described above can introduce performance issues due to the application constantly running in an attempt to update the relationship data. As a result, you might encounter high CPU usage within the database as well as overall performance degradation within the application.

When significant performance issues are encountered as a result of the activity occurring in support of the Job Health Status feature, the functionality should be disabled in order to stabilize the environment. 

Disabling the Job Health Status functionality requires that you turn off the event listener that is processing the job health status. A request to turn off the event listener for your environment can be logged through a Request For Change (RFC) with your Global Hosting Tech Lead. 

Note: Once you turn off the event listener, the job health status no longer updates. As a result, jobs currently displaying the stale icon will remain, and any jobs that subsequently become stale will no longer be marked with the blue border icon.

In addition, be aware that even when the Job Health Status functionality is enabled (that is, the event listener is active), the status indicator might not always be correct if errors are present in the job logs.

Note that the issues documented above are addressed beginning with SAS^® Life Science Analytics Framework 5.4.2.

Operating System and Release Information