Author: William Penn
Date: 06:51:34 12/11/04
Shredder 8 tip: use Tablebase subsets There is far too much hard drive churning with Shredder 8 as simple endgames approach. The slowdown is enormous. The kN/s speed may drop to 10% of normal. I also fear for the life of my hard drive with such constant heavy churning. To return my system to sanity, I've developed some subsets of the tablebases which can generally be used with reasonable demands on my computer system. Of course the 3-4 piece TBs cause no problems, so can be used anytime. Only the bigger 5 piece TBs are causing the problem. As a rule of thumb selecting TBs of about 35MB or less is acceptable, and that comes to about 1GB total TBs. Selecting TBs of about 70MB or less is sometimes acceptable, and that comes to about 2.3GB total TBs. Of course the complete 3-4-5 piece TBs come to 7GB total, but my computer just can't handle them in simpler endgame positions. So there's no point to even considering the huge 6 piece TB files. FYI I'm running an XP 2400+ processor at 2GHz with 1GB RAM. It also helps to reduce the hash size. I normally run about 640-768GB hash, and reducing that to 256MB or 128MB improves the TB access situation. But sometimes that's just not enough in simpler endgame positions, so a smaller set of TBs must be used. This problem is far less severe with other engines. Shredder 8 is the worst, and the only engine I've tried that requires this kind of special compensation. I hope they will fix this in Shredder 9. WP
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.