[R-sig-ME] Speed estimation for lmer?

[Daniel Ezra Johnson]

>>  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