Re: PSPP-BUG: PSPP Problems

[Elio Spinello]

Hi John,

Thanks for the response. I thought I had the most recent, but I will check
on the build.  The same file and syntax ran in a reasonable amount of time
in SPSS v20 (2 minutes).  Since PSPP ran for over 45 minutes without
producing output, I was assuming there was either a problem or limitation.
Even saving the file seemed to make it hang. Watching the temp file in the
output folder, it was only incrementing a few kilobytes per minute.
Stripping down the file to only 100, or so fields I needed to work with made
it much more manageable and I was able to complete the project at hand.
Overall, putting aside the filesize issue I really like the current version
-- very fast and it appears stable.

A couple of questions: Is the workspace only changed through the syntax? Is
it specified in kilobytes?

Thanks again,

Elio


Elio Spinello
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-----Original Message-----
From: John Darrington [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 10:39 PM
To: Elio Spinello
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: PSPP-BUG: PSPP Problems

* PGP Signed by an unknown key

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 06:07:22PM -0700, Elio Spinello wrote:
     I am using 64bit PSPP 0.7.9 on Windows 7 Professional and am running
into
     problems with a large dataset. The dataset is already a SAV file and
seems
     to open fine in PSPP. Once opened, however, pretty much anything done
to it
     will cause the program to hang.  This happens with both the 32 bit and
64
     bit versions on two different computers, both with Windows 7.  Saving
it to
     another filename caused it to crunch for 30 minutes or so and then it
just
     finally stopped and closed the file with no message. The file contains
about
     30,000 records and about 5,000 variables (I know, it's really huge).  I
am
     able to work with it in SPSS with no problem and was hoping to migrate
some
     of the work over to PSPP. Is this filesize beyond it's scope?

No.  PSPP should handle files of any size.

However, there was a bug in 0.7.9 (which affected only Windows versions)
which was fixed very recently. So if you are using one of Harry's prebuilt
binaries, then you should make sure it was one published on or after 15 June
2012.
If you've done that and still experience crashes, then please let us know.

Clearly with such a large file, it will take time to process - so be
patient!  
Some speed improvement is likely if you set your WORKSPACE to a larger value
- depending upon the amount of memory that you have available.


And of course, for applications where reliability is paramount, Windows is
never going to come up with the goods.  So I would consider switching to
GNU/Linux if you need a really robust toolset.

J'

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