Speed estimation for lmer?

-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-mixed-models-bounces at r-project.org 
[mailto:r-sig-mixed-models-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf 
Of Daniel Ezra Johnson
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 5:07 PM
To: r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] Speed estimation for lmer?

 Roughly speaking: lmer and lmer2 aren't (I think) different any 
more, they were different branches of the same software.  

They should 

both be much faster than lme.  glmer (from lme4) and glmmPQL (from 
nlme) should not be necessary unless you have binomial, 

Poisson, etc. 

data rather than normally distributed responses.

Ben is correct.  There are functions lmer and lmer2 in the current
lme4 package but lmer2 is just a stub that turns around and calls 
lmer.  If your response y is on a continuous scale then it 

should be 

lmer that you use.

so if my response is on a continuous scale, is there any 
difference between

lmer(y~fixed+(1|random)) and
glmer(y~fixed+(1|random),family="gaussian") ?

the output is the same but since reading the above i'm 
wondering if 'plain' lmer is written to run faster?

d