This page contains only historical information and is not about the current release of Stata. Please see our capabilities page for information on the current version of Stata.

Stata 8 is even faster

• This increase in speed is due to a new, faster memory manager that reduces the time needed to find, access, and store results. Thus, the improvement only slightly affects the time to run built-in, heavily computational commands. regress, for instance, runs only 1.43% faster. Nevertheless, the effect can be marked on other commands. poisson runs up to 31% faster, and heckman runs up to 43% faster. The larger the dataset, the less the improvement will be: for example, heckman runs 17% faster on 4,000 observations.
  
  
• That statistical commands run faster is a happy side effect. The big advantage of the increased speed is that it allows some problems to be approached using ado-files that previously would have required internal code, such as Stata's new graphics, which are implemented as an ado-file! Some programming commands run up to 4 times faster. Implementing features as ado-files is part of the effort to keep Stata open to and extendable by users.