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From | "Martin Weiss" <martin.weiss1@gmx.de> |
To | <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: AW: RE: AW: Op. sys. refuses to provide memory - a cautionary tale |
Date | Tue, 9 Mar 2010 13:35:50 +0100 |
<> I never said _anything_ about my own setup... Just that this is not the situation that most prospective Stata 11 users are likely to be faced with... HTH Martin -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] Im Auftrag von Nick Cox Gesendet: Dienstag, 9. März 2010 13:31 An: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu Betreff: st: RE: AW: Op. sys. refuses to provide memory - a cautionary tale Please: let's stop all exchanges of the form "my computer is big, yours is small" form before they're even started. People can have all sorts of good reasons for having what others regard as underpowered systems, not least that it's all their employers would pay for and that they have plenty of other legitimate private expenses. I thought Benjamin's post was interesting and constructive. Nick n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk Martin Weiss But your "cautionary tale" largely rests on the "modesty" of your system. I take it from the email from tech support that you have a 32-bit XP system on a six months old machine? That is modest indeed, and I do not think that this will be the situation other people considering an upgrade to Stata 11 are likely to encounter. Stata 11 was probably optimized for 64-bit usage, which is becoming more and more common. I do recall hearing something about upgrades to the executable being finetuned for 64 bit at the UGMs last year... Craig, Benjamin M. This posting is based on my recent experience with STATA MP 11 and may be useful to those who wish to have more memory. My modest six-month-old Dell PC has 4 GB RAM. Under Stata 9.2, I was able to set memory to 935MB (see below), but when I installed Stata 11, the memory was reduced by 50% (470MB). Adjusting the boot.ini or closing programs had no effect, so I contacted the Stata help desk via email and received the prompt and effective response (below). The end of the story is that after a day of tinkering I was able to increase Stata MP 11 memory to 725MB by installing Windows Service Pack 3. And, I intend to buy a 64-bit machine, once budget allows. I attribute this issue to Windows, not Stata; however, I hope that this posting clarifies the issue for other Stata users, particularly those purchasing a new machine or considering an upgrade to Stata 11. Cheers, Ben Under State 9.2 . qui for X in numlist 100(5)1000: capture set mem Xm . query mem Current memory allocation current memory usage settable value description (1M = 1024k) -------------------------------------------------------------------- set maxvar 5000 max. variables allowed 1.733M set memory 935M max. data space 935.000M set matsize 400 max. RHS vars in models 1.254M ----------- 937.987M Under Stata MP 11 . qui for X in numlist 100(5)1000: capture set mem Xm . query mem Current memory allocation current memory usage settable value description (1M = 1024k) -------------------------------------------------------------------- set maxvar 5000 max. variables allowed 1.909M set memory 470M max. data space 470.000M set matsize 400 max. RHS vars in models 1.254M ----------- 473.163M Under Stata MP 11 after installing Windows service pack 3 . qui for X in numlist 100(5)1000: capture set mem Xm . query mem Current memory allocation current memory usage settable value description (1M = 1024k) -------------------------------------------------------------------- set maxvar 5000 max. variables allowed 1.909M set memory 725M max. data space 725.000M set matsize 6900 max. RHS vars in models 363.815M ----------- 1,090.724M -----Original Message----- From: Stata Technical Support [mailto:tech-support@stata.com] Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 3:00 PM To: Craig, Benjamin M. Subject: Re: Op. sys. Refuses to provide memory Dear Ben, What is your Windows XP service pack? The problem you are describing sounds like the memory issues that Windows XP Service pack 2 had until Microsoft fixed it with the release of Service pack 3. It is important to remember that all memory management is handled by the operating system. Thus, when you try to increase the amount of RAM reserved for Stata, it is the operating system that tells you it can't give you any more memory. Now besides the Windows XP Service pack 2 memory management issues, all 32-bit operating systems have trouble allocating large blocks of RAM to any single application. And since Stata requires a contiguous block of RAM, meaning that the block of RAM must have contiguous adressing, this issue becomes even more problematical. A 32-bit operating system can only theoretically allocate 2 GBs of RAM addressing to any one application. However, in practicality, the actual amount of continuous RAM addressing that can be allocated to any one given application is around 1 GB of RAM for a 32-bit Windows XP operating system. **It is important to know that this upper allocation limit does not increase by simply adding more RAM to the system because we are talking about a contiguous block of RAM, and not just total available RAM. As for Stata 9 having a larger block of RAM allocation that Stata 11 does, this is due to Stata 9's smaller footprint. Since Stata 11 uses more RAM just to be up and running, this translates into less of the contiguous block of RAM that is leftover for loading datasets. There are two options for increasing the amount of contiguous RAM that can be allocated to Stata: 1) Go into the Windows Task manager and shutdown as many unnecessary programs as you can in an attempt to free up more system resources. 2) Load Stata 11 onto a 64-bit operating system, which won't have the same memory restrictions that a 32-bit operating system has. * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/ * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/