Re: st: Two wishes

["Neil Shephard" <nshephard@gmail.com>]

On 5/23/06, SamL <saml@demog.berkeley.edu> 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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Email - nshephard@gmail.com / neilshep@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/

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