Optimizing For SAS & Multiprocessors

[Karl Balsmeier]

I have just recommended to our developer team that it's time to optimize the server for SAS.

When I do this in Linux for Oracle and MySQL, I use the /proc filesystem and adjust the number of open filehandles a machine is allowed to have, and some corresponding files, all during run time.

My question is where do I start off with HPUX?

I know there aren't that many HPUX/SAS cross-skilled folks who might be around to give me a full recipe, but a few good starters for [recompiling the kernel?] would be great, especially since this is a 4 processor system, an HP 9000/800/4050.

I plan to make my full findings avaialble to the community, so feel free to get in-depth, points abound.

-Karl R. Balsmeier

[Bill Douglass · Accepted solution]

Check out this link:

http://www.sas.com/partners/directory/hp/hpuxwp2.pdf

It has several good suggestions about optimizing your HP-UX system for SAS.

Not surprisingly, some of the most significant issues have to do with disk and filesystem issues, rather than kernel tuning. Since SAS is very disk-intensive, I would recommand trying to balance I/O across as multiple spindles.