Over the lastest year or two we have had ongoing issues running SAS 9.1 on 32 bit windows.
Main two issues that constantly arise are:
- Metadata server exceeding addressable memory in 32 bit windows and crashing
- I/O errors intermittently reading/writing SAS datasets
We have tried all the SAS “support” tools to reduce the size of our metadata server. The final answer seems to be we will have to create a new one from scratch and export/import the object we need to retain.
We have also “tweaked” the windows file cache to reduce the I/O errors due to the windows file buffers being written faster than they can be cleared. On that note I found this tech support note the other day:
Problem Note 36664: Potential issues with heavy SAS® I/O workloads on Windows 2003, 32- or 64-bit operating systems
Which I paraphrase as saying dont use Windows 2003 if you want to actually process any reasonable amount of data.
Of course the real answer it seems is to move to SAS 9.2 and 64 bit Windows 2008, but it does make me wonder how long it would take before you blew the limits of that operating system?
And shouldn’t the SAS environment at least tell you when it was experiencing these issues, rather than just abending so rudely?
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