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Re: st: Two wishes


From   "Neil Shephard" <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Two wishes
Date   Tue, 23 May 2006 14:47:31 +0800

On 5/23/06, SamL <[email protected]> wrote:
Going the other way, I wish stata would allow me to use disk as RAM, so
that the limit on the size of my (single) dataset would be my total
diskspace (some 200 GB counting the disks I have on the Unix cluster)
rather than the RAM on the largest machine in the cluster (only 12 GB).
Although I have no plans to use a 200 GB file, I have had need of more
than 12GB, and I have had to make tough choices (and some complex
time-consuming runs) to get it under 12GB--not to mention how popular this
makes me to all the other people in my cluster who need the same machine
at the same time.

Stata already does that, but such methods are inherently slow (as
you've found) because of the massive difference in speed between I/O
(Input/Output) on RAM (v. fast) compared to HD (v.slow).

Check using the command 'top' to see if your analysis is really maxing
out RAM or CPU.

Neil
--
"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get
tired."  - Jules Renard

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