Tuning SAS Visual Analytics

Modifying Performance Settings

To modify SAS Visual Analytics Performance settings:

1. In the application bar, click the user name button, and then click Settings.
2. Expand the SAS Visual Analytics item in the side menu, and then select Interface, Report Defaults, Performance.
3. Update the settings that you want to change.
   TipWhen you click Reset, the settings revert to their original values.

   Here are some performance-related settings that users might want to change:

   Disable categorical distinct counts for the Data pane

   specifies that you do not want distinct count (cardinality) values to be displayed beside data items in the Data pane. If you enable this setting after the distinct counts are already displayed in the Data pane, SAS Visual Analytics will not retrieve the values in the future. If you close and reopen the report, the distinct counts are not displayed.

   Enabling the Disable categorical distinct counts for the Data pane setting can improve performance. However, the Suggestions pane cannot be displayed if this setting is enabled.

   Disable automatic correlation detection for the Data pane

   specifies that you do not want correlation values to be displayed in the Data pane. If you enable this setting, you cannot select measures that are correlated with a selected measure.

   Enabling the Disable automatic correlation detection for the Data pane setting can improve performance. However, the Suggestions pane cannot be displayed if this setting is enabled.

   Disable automatic outlier detection for the Data pane

   specifies that you do not want possible outlier values to be displayed in the Data pane. Enabling the Disable automatic outlier detection for the Data pane setting can improve report performance.

   Insight mode (editing)

   specifies whether SAS Visual Analytics automatically checks the current report for insights while you are editing a report. Select Auto to check automatically, or select Manual to check only when you click the icon in the report toolbar.

   Insight mode (viewing)

   specifies whether SAS Visual Analytics automatically checks the current report for insights while you are viewing a report. Select Auto to check automatically, or select Manual to check only when you click the icon on the report toolbar.

4. Click Close to apply your changes.

Avoiding Out-of-Memory Issues

Supporting a large number of concurrent users can cause the sas-cas-control service to throw an out-of-memory (OOM) error. User concurrency in SAS Visual Analytics is quite common, for example, because the offering supports many other SAS applications. If multiple users access SAS Visual Analytics reports around the same time, you might see a Linux cgroup OOM issue when the pod limit on the machine is exceeded. Each SAS Visual Analytics user can create multiple CAS sessions that are open simultaneously. In some situations, between 300 and 400 concurrent CAS sessions can be open on the same machine, which can cause the cgroup OOM error.

In addition to user concurrency, pod OOM errors can be triggered by the following factors:

• VM instance memory and VM I/O caps
• Values of VM settings: vm.dirty_ratio, vm.dirty_background_ratio, and vm.min_free_kbytes
• I/O device speed
• Amount of data that is written concurrently
• The pod memory limit

In your monitoring software, set an alert that fires when container memory utilization rises above 95% of the container memory limit. Then when that alert is triggered, increase the container's memory limit to avoid OOM problems when a large number of users attempt to view SAS Visual Analytics reports.