Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Why the 'cold' processor is _correlated_ with better performance

Author: Ratko V Tomic

Date: 20:37:50 04/24/02

Go up one level in this thread


>"It's just physics -- the longer a processor runs, the more it heats up and the
>less efficient it becomes.  Your program will play better chess right after you
>turn your computer on than it will after the machine's been running for hours or
>even days"
>
>Say what??

On Windows machines the advice is correct although the explanation above
is wrong. Basically Windows (especially Win9x) doesn't clean-up
resources well after the application exits (or even merely runs
for a while & allocates/releases system resources). You can easily
check this using Microsoft's sysmon.exe utility (watch the numeric
tables, not the less accurate graphical display). There are also
bugs in Windows which trigger on some specific events. E.g. marking
and deleting large number of files as a group triggers on Win98/me
in combination with some "upgrades" of IE (including the latest IE6)
an odd code which waits in an i/o thread 30 seconds for an event,
blocking all Shell operations. There are other places where Outlook
Express becomes like a molassis (continuously trying to contact
some non-applicable web service and timing out).

Lots of these performance problems with duration of run are due to
the general entropy production of a complex code, which in some
form should occur in other systems as well.




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.