I hesitated to answer, because I don't have much to offer. We have been
running Stata for many years with Solaris (on Sparc) and Linux (x86) and
haven't ever noticed anything that a sysadmin can do to affect throughput,
other than keep an eye on users with working sets larger than available
physical memory - any paging will cause run times to become near infinite.
The Stata compress command will help out with this sometimes, but that is
something the user will have to do.
Otherwise, you need to look at the code and understand Stata (and/or
econometrics) to do much about resource usage. A system administrator
can't really be expected to tell a user he doesn't need 5,000 dummy
variables, but that is a big resource saver when true.
BTW - Does anyone have an idea if Stata is very sensitive to cache sizes?
The difference between a SUN Blade 2000 and 2500 appears to be only in the
size of the caceh - 2 or 8 meg (and $3,500 in price). Does anyone know if
it would make much a speed difference? Also, Xeons now come with 512k or
1meg of cache - does that make a difference? I can report that
hyperthreading works very well with two Stata jobs running simultaneously
- we get nearly the throughput of two CPUs. I can also report that we find
that throughput on a Sparc is very similar to throughput on an X86 of the
same clock speed. The Sparc advantage comes only when it can address more
memory.
Daniel Feenberg
On Tue, 13 Apr 2004,
Bo Bo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a simple sys admin and have just installed stata on a
> system running Solaris 9 for a few users. The users are running
> pretty big jobs- I was wondering if I can do anything on the system
> side to speed things up.
>
> My question is-
>
> Is there any documentation or FAQ on how to get the best
> performance/optimization for stata on a box running Solaris.
> Or any tips or tricks that might be used.
>
> If this is not the correct forum for this question, I apologize.
>
> TIA,
>
> -john
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
