st: Upgrading from v9 to v10mp

[Simon Moore <simoncmoore@gmail.com>]

Dear Statalist,

There's several reasons why I'd like to upgrade from Stata 9 to Stata 
10.  But I have a question about MP and whether this is something I 
should be looking at (as I have dual core CPU).

From the info I've found (http://www.stata.com/statamp/) MP is suitable 
and *should* be faster for most analyses.  The same info also states 
that not all processes will run in parallel, however.  It would seem 
silly for me to pay extra only to find that the most computationally 
intensive work I do (which isn't a great deal) cannot make use of this 
extra processing power.  So I was wondering whether anyone on Statalist 
might be able to offer some thoughts?

Probably the most intensive work involves such things as xtlogit and 
I've also looked at reoprob - with a large survey and bootstrapping 
would MP work through user written commands (i.e. reoprob) any faster?  
Other things that can take time include cycling through large -foreach 
num- lists and using postfile (neither reoprob nor postfile are covered 
in report.pdf at http://www.stata.com/statamp/) to generate a new 
dataset.  Would these be noticeably quicker under MP? 
What's my MP criteria?  I suppose shaving 1 or 2 seconds of something 
that takes 1 or 2 seconds wouldn't be that useful, I just don't get 
another sip of coffee.  Similarly, shaving a few hours off something 
that takes more 24 hours to run probably wouldn't mean that much as I'd 
be doing something else anyway.  It's the 'not quite long enough to go 
do something useful' tasks where I'd find the extra speed most useful... 
are the time savings linear over problem size?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated

Simon
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