  The ergm package supports the statistical analysis and simulation of network
data. It anchors the statnet suite of packages for network analysis in R
introduced in a special issue in Journal of Statistical Software in 2008. This
article provides an overview of the performance improvements in the 2021
release of ergm version 4. These include performance enhancements to the Markov
chain Monte Carlo and maximum likelihood estimation algorithms as well as
broader and faster searching for networks with certain target statistics using
simulated annealing.
