Author: Mike Hood
Date: 04:47:57 05/05/04
I just let Filemon run while loading Fritz 8 to see why it takes so long. I was shocked to see that during the initialisation Fritz tries to open every possible tablebase. For instance... Open kpk.nbw.emd -- good, it's there Open kpknbw.emd -- file not found Open kpk_nbw.emd -- file not found Open kpk_nbw_emd -- file not found (I never knew this format was valid) Open kpk.nbw -- file not found And the same five accesses for the nbb file. Why carry on with the other three after finding the first tablebase? But it gets even wilder when it comes to the 6-piece tablebases. All 365 possible tablebase pairs in all possible formats are accessed, even though I don't have any on my disk. Thousands of "file not found" results. Just one example, to show how ludicrous it is: First Fritz tries to open krbnkp.nbw.emd, krbnkpnbw.emd, krbnkp_nbw.emd and krbnkp.nbw.emd. Almost the same as before, except Fritz is assuming 6-piece tablebases are compressed. But then Fritz tries to open krbnkp.0.nbw.emd, krbnkp.0_nbw.emd, krbnkp.0nbw.emd and krbnkp.0_nbw_emd. Then krbnkp.1.nbw.emd, etc... and krbnkp.2.nbw.emd... and all the way through to krbnkp.g.nbw.emd. That means 136 disk accesses for a tablebase that I don't have! And that's only one tablebase out of 365. Wouldn't it be much easier just to scan the tablebase directory and only open the files that actually exist?
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Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
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