Author: Mike Hood
Date: 06:14:50 05/05/04
Go up one level in this thread
On May 05, 2004 at 08:12:44, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On May 05, 2004 at 07:47:57, Mike Hood wrote: > >>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? > >Both nalimov and i do this in a similar way. > >If you are willing to write code for this that works faster and works both for >windows and *nix, then i will be real happy to use it. > >Best Regards, >Vincent Thanks for the info, Vincent. I assumed the initialization code had been written by Chessbase, not by Eugene. My math was a bit off in my original post, but after looking at Filemon's log I can give the exact figure: Fritz attempts to access 33647 non-existent tablebase files. And please... you can't tell me that if the file krbnkp.0.nbw.emd doesn't exist it still makes sense to look for krbnkp.1.nbw.emd, krbnkp.2.nbw.emd, etc all the way to krbnkp.g.nbw.emd. That's a waste of processor time on any operating system.
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