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Note: This FAQ is for users of Stata 7. It is not relevant for more recent versions.

Stata 7: Mac memory allocation

Title   Stata 7: Mac memory allocation
Author Chinh Nguyen, StataCorp


I have my memory doubled/tripled by Ram Doubler, but Stata is not recognizing all of it.

A common misconception about Ram Doubler is that once it doubles/triples your memory, you can use all of it in one application. You can’t. You cannot allocate more memory than is physically on your computer to any application without using virtual memory.

What Ram Doubler allows you to do is to run more applications concurrently. For example, if you have 16 megs of physical memory and Ram Doubler doubles it to 32, you cannot allocate 32 megs to one application, nor can you allocate more than 16 megs. You can allocate 16 megs to two separate applications. Without Ram Doubler, those two applications would be limited to sharing the 16 megs.

How do I increase memory allocated to Stata?

Click the Stata application once (make sure you are not selecting the Stata.do file), and then select Get Info from the Finder’s File menu. Go to the Preferred size: edit field in the Memory Requirements text box. Increase the size (it is in K, so to allocate 8 megs of memory to Stata, set the size to 8000 K). Stata occupies approximately 1 meg of memory, so if you set the size to 8000 K, you would have approximately 7000 K of memory for data.

Increasing the settings has no effect on Small Stata. Never decrease the Preferred memory setting below the Minimum memory setting.