Commit Memory

[Adrian Sayers]

Hi all,

I wondered if anyone knows how to change the amount of memory is being "Commit"[ed] to the OS every time stata starts.

It seems like its using around 2.5GB which is quite a chunk.

thanks

Adrian

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

2.5GB is quite a lot. On my system, it only uses <100 MB of memory. Are you using Stata in a managed, network environment? Or are you starting Stata by opening a large dataset?

In general, modern Stata no longer requires manual management of memory. You may want to post the output of:

memory
query memory

[Adrian Sayers]

Hi Leonardo,

Its huge. Its a unlimited user 2 core network licence on a server.

 memory

Memory usage
                                         Used                Allocated
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Data                                        0               67,108,864
strLs                                       0                        0
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Data & strLs                                0               67,108,864

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Data & strLs                                0               67,108,864
Variable names, %fmts, ...                  4                   65,000
Overhead                            1,081,344                1,082,136

Stata matrices                              0                        0
ado-files                                   0                        0
Stored results                              0                        0

Mata matrices                               0                        0
Mata functions                              0                        0

set maxvar usage                    5,281,738                5,281,738

Other                                   2,716                    2,716
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                               6,363,258               73,540,454

.
. query memory
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Memory settings
      set maxvar           5000       2048-120000; max. vars allowed
      set niceness         5          0-10
      set min_memory       0          0-1600g
      set max_memory       .          32m-1600g or .
      set segmentsize      32m        1m-32g
      set adosize          1000       kilobytes
      set max_preservemem  1g         0-1600g

. sysresources ,d
Total committed memory is : 2.4 GiB
Free Swap Space is : 265.0 GiB
Total Available Swap Space is : 283.5 GiB
Process CPU Time is : 4343750000
Free Physical Memory Available is : 243.7 GiB
Total Physical Memory Available is : 255.6 GiB
System CPU Load is : 0.0
Process Load is : 0.015623800092152923
% Free Physical Memory is : 95.33596766330213

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I'm not really sure. You didn't say that -sysresources- can be found here. Some quick googling suggests that committed memory is a combination of both RAM and pagefile (or equivalent), including committed address space and not actual data being held in memory. I'm not sure that I'd worry about it.

[Adrian Sayers]

Hi leonardo,

net inst sysresources, from(http://wbuchanan.github.io/StataOS/)
sysresources, d

sorry about that , the install command is above.

I am trying to open 100 instances of Stata and the commit gets very large very quickly.

I think the Committed memory is reserved space in case the Stata needs to dump from RAM onto Disk (virtual Memory).

I have a colleague that is also Using Stata 17.0 and his total Committed memory is less than <1GB.

It just seems odd to have the same Stata with two different amounts of committed memory.

[James Hassell (StataCorp)]

Some quick googling suggests that committed memory is a combination of both RAM and pagefile (or equivalent), including committed address space and not actual data being held in memory. I'm not sure that I'd worry about it.

Leonardo Guizzetti is correct.

Adrian Sayers , I think that what is going on is that you are wanting to run many (100) Stata instances on a Windows computer. Unfortunately Windows has a somewhat limited resource pool. These are resources for creating windows, controls, drawing lines, drawing text, etc. It is my understanding that there is a global allocation as well as a per-user login-session allocation for these resources which is limited. These resources may be more limited when connecting to Windows using Remote Desktop (RDP). This behavior is not well documented by Microsoft.

To avoid this you can run Linux as a virtual machine under Hyper-V. We have had really good results with this type of setup and also have had feedback from users as well to suggest the same.

We are now working directly with Adrian Sayers to get more information about his environment and needs.

[Adrian Sayers]

James Hassell (StataCorp) Thanks very much for the response, your advice and help is greatly appreciated.