st: Re: ram memory: ms fix does not work (surprised?)

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Others have suggested technical tweaks to your computer. I would  
suggest that if you are trying to create 1049 GMM Instruments in  
xtabond2, you probably want to rethink your strategy. If your T is  
double-digit, letting xtabond2 (or any implementation of Arellano- 
Bond) make all the possible instruments is a very bad idea. Use the  
lags suboption to control how far back it goes to generate  
instruments -- in my own work lags 3-5 are usually enough. Allowing  
xtabond2 to use lags 3-17 is a recipe for disaster, even if you don't  
run into problems with XP's memory mismanagement.

For comparison, an Apple xServe with 6 Gb RAM -- a "last-generation"  
machine, not one of the new Intel Macs --  is running Stata as a 32- 
bit app (due to the operating system) although the machine is 64-bit.  
The next release of Mac OS X will allow 'true' 64-bit apps (as  
Solaris or some Linuxes do). On that machine, I can get away with

set mem 2250m

with no problem.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


On Nov 7, 2006, at 2:33 AM, Roberto wrote:


> This is a huge issue as I cannot run the xtabond2 estimations I need
> to, since the system runs out of memory:
>    xtabond2_mata():  3900  unable to allocate real <tmp>[35360,1049]
>                    <istmt>:     -  function returned error
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