Running SAS 9.3 on MBP - How to improve performance?

chevman said:

My wife is currently running SAS 9.3 on a Windows XP VM using Virtual Box. Her physical hardware is a (relatively) old Mac Book, Core2Duo 1.8 GHz with 2 GB ram.

Going to upgrade her to a new MBP when the refresh happens (hopefully soon!).

Question for those with experience with this - what would lead to the greatest performance boost when running SAS under this use case:

- Max out the RAM?
- Install an SSD?
- Go with the faster processor option?

Any insight or advice is appreciated - thank you!

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RAM and SSD's are the two things that I would upgrade maybe 6GB of RAM is good enough(Note you will lose dual channel mode) and I would get a 128 GB SSD and remove the super drive and put a larger HHD in there for more storage.

macbook pro i5 said:

RAM and SSD's are the two things that I would upgrade maybe 6GB of RAM is good enough(Note you will lose dual channel mode) and I would get a 128 GB SSD and remove the super drive and put a larger HHD in there for more storage.

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Is she running SAS on her local machine or submitting it to run on a SAS server? If the second option, can you upgrade internet connection speed?

chevman said:

She is running everything locally, there is no external server in the equation.

Data sets are all on the local disk too.

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More the reason to put an 128 SSD+ replace super drive to A 500GB HHD and upgrade to 6 GB of RAM.If you have the money go 16GB.

chevman said:

Do you avoid this by putting the same size stick in each bay?

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yes if instead of 6GB of RAM you add 8 then you will get dual channel mode back.

macbook pro i5 said:

More the reason to put an 128 SSD+ replace super drive to A 500GB HHD and upgrade to 6 GB of RAM.If you have the money go 16GB.

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A 2006 MacBook will not support 16gb of RAM. I believe the max is 3gb on that machine.

Edit: Just realized you were giving specs for a new MacBook. I wasn't sure if OP was asking what to do with the old computer or a new one.

mikeo007 said:

A 2006 MacBook will not support 16gb of RAM. I believe the max is 3gb on that machine.

Edit: Just realized you were giving specs for a new MacBook. I wasn't sure if OP was asking what to do with the old computer or a new one.

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Yes I was confused for a second but I assumed he was talking about a new one.

I think that the Retina MBP will be a less jarring transition from a Macbook since it weighs about the same.

The Retina MBP has the same processing power as the non-Retina model, but the SSD will make a big difference in a lot of tasks.

I've run both Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my cMBP bought in 2012 (specs below) and it runs extremely well. I've dedicated 2 cores and 4GB of RAM to Windows 7 and I can actually play a lot of games in the VM (albeit not very new ones). League of Legends, Halo, and Warcraft 3 run just fine at native 1680x1050. I would assume that for non-gaming tasks, the machine is perfectly capable for everything you throw at it in a VM.

I am using VMWare Fusion, btw

chevman said:

To respond to my own thread, ended up going with the base retina Macbook Pro with an upgrade to 16 gb ram.

Running SAS on Windows XP in Virtual Box freaking SCREAMS.

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You made a great choice.

In order to minimize the use of my internal SSD, I got a 128GB SDD and put it in a USB3 enclosure. Since I only use my VM for development for work, it's not a big deal for me to have to plug in the disk. This way can step the VM to a static disk size for best performance, but I don't feel like I'm "wasting" space on the internal disk with a 90GB VM file.

The performance over USB3 is almost as good as running locally as well, so if you don't mind the inconvenience of the extra device it's a nice setup.