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st: Re: List is slow


From   [email protected] (Alan Riley)
To   [email protected]
Subject   st: Re: List is slow
Date   Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:44:46 -0600

Fred Wolfe ([email protected]) wrote
> Using  Windows 2000. In stata 7 with 313,000 obs, -list- is instantaneous. 
> In Stata 8, list, clean takes 2 seconds on my main machine and 8 seconds on 
> a laptop to begin to display. Is there a way to speed it up?

The quick answer is that Fred should use

   . list, nocompress

because he has a large dataset and wants output to start as
quickly as possible.

By default, -list- examines the data and decides on the width needed
to display each variable.  It does so to try to make the output of
-list- as nice as possible.  A display format on a variable might be
set to %9.0g, but if that variable contains only single digit integers
as values, there is no point in using 9 columns of screen width to
list it.

Examining the data can take a few seconds for large datasets
like Fred has.  In these cases, the -nocompress- option may be
used with -list- to tell it to just use the display formats on
the variables rather than trying to be smart and examine every
value in every variable.  Output will start instantaneously.


--Alan
([email protected])
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