The options fullstimer; gives you a way to do comprehensive performance analysis in SAS. Below is the description of FULLSTIMER from the SAS website.
The SAS System provides the FULLSTIMER option to collect performance statistics on each SAS step, and for the job as a whole and place them in the SAS log. It is important to note that the FULLSTIMER measures only give you a snapshot view of performance at the step and job level. Each SAS port yields different FULLSTIMER statistics based on the host operating system.
Eg.
NOTE: DATA statement used: real time 0.06 seconds user cpu time 0.02 seconds system cpu time 0.00 seconds Memory 88k Page Faults 10 Page Reclaims 0 Page Swaps 0 Voluntary Context Switches 22 Involuntary Context Switches 0 Block Input Operations 10 Block Output Operations 12
| Real Time | The Real Time represents the elapsed time or “wall clock” time. This is the time spent to execute a job or step. This is the time the user experiences in wait for the job/step to complete. Note: As host system resources are heavily utilized the Real Time can go up significantly – representing a wait for various system resources to become available for the SAS job/step’s usage. |
| User CPU Time | The time spent by the processor to execute user-written code. This is user-written from the perspective of the operating system and not the customer’s language statements. That is all SAS system code that is not operating system code. |
| System CPU Time | The time spent by the processor to execute operating system tasks that support user-written code (all CPU tasks that were not executing user-written code). The user CPU time and system CPU time are mutually exclusive. |
| Memory | Memory represents the amount of memory allocated to that job/step. This does not represent the entire amount of memory that the SAS session is consuming, as it does not reflect any SAS overhead activities (SAS manager, etc.). |
| Page Faults | Represents the number of virtual memory page faults that occurred during the job/step. Page Faults are pages that required an I/O to retrieve (a read was done to the I/O subsystem). |
| Page Reclaims | Represents the number of pages retrieved from the page list awaiting re-allocation (all done in memory). These pages did not require I/O activity to obtain. |
| Page Swaps | The number of times a process was swapped out of main memory. |
| Voluntary Context Switches | Represents the number of times a process releases its CPU time-slice voluntarily before it’s time-slice allocation is expired. This usually occurs when the process needs an external resource, like making an I/O call for more data. |
| Involuntary Context Switches | The number of times a process releases its CPU time-slice involuntarily. This usually happens when its CPU time-slice has expired before the task was finished, or a higher priority task takes its time-slice away. |
| Block Input Operations | The number of “bufsize” reads that occur. These are I/O operations to read the data into memory for usage. Not all reads have to utilize an I/O operation since the page being requested may still be cached in memory from previous reads. |
| Block Output Operations | This represents the number of “bufsize” writes that occur. These are the same as block input operations except that they pertain to the writes to files. As in the case of block input operations, not all block outputs will cause an I/O operation. Some files may still be cached in memory. |