SAS Companion for the Microsoft Windows Environment

Operation on Windows NT

In addition to benefiting from features that are specific to Windows NT, such as the 64-bit capabilities of NTFS and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), the SAS System takes advantage of several other capabilities in the Windows NT operating environment:

performance enhancements

The SAS System takes advantage of NT features that improve the performance of input and output in the Windows NT operating environment. These include optimizations for both sequential and random I/O, and taking advantage of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in multi-processor machines.

SAS benefits from SMP capabilities as larger amounts of read-ahead processing is done when operating on procedures that do large amounts of sequential data access for data stored on Windows NT Server. This occurs more on systems with extra processing power to service NT and its disk cache.

In addition, SAS System executable images are "based" to allow optimal loading in the Windows NT virtual memory space to provide faster load times.

[IMAGE] For large data processing requirements, greater throughput performance can be achieved using the Scatter-read/Gather-write I/O processing.

[IMAGE] If your server uses the Pentium II Xeon processor, the SAS System can access memory beyond the 4 gigabyte boundary. Extended Server Memory Architecture (ESMA) memory can be used as a very large disk cache or an in-memory library.

For more information, see SAS System Features that Optimize Performance.

monitoring tools

Version 8 takes advantage of Windows NT system utilities, such as Performance Monitor and Event Log, for more accurate diagnostics and monitoring when deployed in a distributed server environment. For more information, see Overview.

additional 64-bit file system support

More procedures take advantage of the 64-bit filesystem support that is available under NTFS.

higher RAM limits

The SAS System takes advantage of 4-gigabyte tuning that is available in Windows NT Server 4.0, Enterprise Edition. This allows SAS System applications that require large amounts of virtual memory to directly access up to 3 gigabytes of RAM in large server systems.

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