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Subject: Re: kpk.nbw.emd

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:09:09 06/13/02

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On June 12, 2002 at 14:35:06, Bas Hamstra wrote:

>On June 12, 2002 at 11:33:19, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On June 12, 2002 at 10:59:16, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>>
>>>Currently I use Nalimov tablebases in uncompressed format. Now I have seen you
>>>can compress into emd format. Is it possible to use them directly in that
>>>format? If so, how?
>>>
>>>Best regards,
>>>Bas.
>>
>>
>>The code Eugene supplies (on my ftp site) does this.  In fact, it is one of
>>two major innovations Eugene produced (on-the-fly decompression that is very
>>efficient along with the very efficient indexing scheme that reduces the file
>>sizes significantly prior to compression)...
>>
>>His code will recognize compressed or uncompressed tables and use either.
>
>Bob, 2 questions. How bad is the perfomance loss compared to uncompressed? And
>can the 4 man tables be loaded in RAM in compressed form?
>
>Thanks,
>Bas.


Unless you have very fast SCSI disks, using compressed tables is _faster_ than
using uncompressed tables.  It reduces the total disk I/O demand since reading
a block of compressed data is cheaper than reading a block that is not
compressed.

When I tested this way way back, using 10K rpm 160mb/sec scsi drives, not
compressing was between 5-10% faster.  But for slower SCSI drives and all IDE
drives at the time, compressed was significantly _faster_...



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