Folks:
My prior was to use linux with Stata 9, but I did some very informal
benchmarking before leaping (n.b.: I have both a linux 64-bit and a
windows x64 license). I ran comparisons using the same dual boot machine.
One drive had windows server 2003 64-bit and the other had the 64-bit
version of ubuntu. Hardware: tyan k8we, 2x252 opterons, 8x1gb ocz server
ram, and 1 74gb sata raptor for each os config.
On a suite of operations that were mle regressions, histograms, summaries,
and some user written code to generate comparisons to benford's law for
large data sets, I found that the windows version of Stata 9 did much
better overall than linux (over the suite, linux took over 50% longer to
finish). I haven't broken this down by task or thought real hard about
weightings of the various items in the suite.
Before I do more, I was wondering if
i. anyone has done any benchmarking comparing linux to windows
ii. if anyone has any idea what the holdup might be for the above tasks in
linux. Using pure processor benchmarks like computing digits of pi, linux
is a touch faster than windows.
Thanks for any help or guidance. I called Stata tech support and they had
no benchmarks. They did reveal they prefer linux in-house.
Scott
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