Statconn (R&Eviews), loops and screen refresh

[tchaithonov]

Hi there,

I have been writing some codes to pass data to R via Statconn in a set of nested loops, and the program is slow due mostly to screen refresh even when I have "mode quiet" and "logmode addin" at the beginning of the code. Is there a way to stop the screen refresh till the whole thing is done? Would you please let me know? Thanks.

Tchaithonov

[EViews Gareth]

What screen refresh?

[tchaithonov]

Hey Gareth, this is similar to the situation when you write a loop to generate series without putting mode quiet on, the new series show up instantaneously after their creation? But with statconn, even with mode quiet, it still does that. What I do in the code is to use xput to send the data over to R, xrun, xget to get a vector back, and then mtos it into a series. It just seems to have ignored mode quiet altogether.

[EViews Gareth]

True, but the small screen refresh to update the workfile contents window is probably a tiny fraction of the time spent in actually getting the object from R.

[tchaithonov]

But if you have to pass through 100x100x100 (Cross-section x time-series x var, just as an example), it's going to take you a long time...

[EViews Gareth]

Yes, the operation will take a long time, but 99% of that time will still be the transaction between R and EViews. The time spent updating the workfile will still be inconsequential.

[tchaithonov]

And I suppose, from an Eviews perspective, there is no way to make statconn runs faster?

[EViews Gareth]

Not really. I think we're pretty much optimized on our end.

[EViews Gareth]

Of course, if possible, it might be quicker to bundle all the different things up into one object in R, then bring that big object over and de-bundle it once it is over. For example, rather than bringing over 1000 vectors, bring over 1 matrix with 1000 columns.

[tchaithonov]

So, I guess the fastest way would be to minimize the number of transactions between R and Eviews then... which means I need to make R understands panel data correctly .... alrighty, thanks Gareth!

[EViews Gareth]

There is no guarantee that it will actually be faster. It may be that bundling and de-bundling stuff will take longer than multiple transactions. You'll have to experiment to see.