Author: Peter Skinner
Date: 13:30:53 04/05/05
Go up one level in this thread
On April 04, 2005 at 22:26:28, Mathieu Pagé wrote: >Hi, > >Whith the increase in size of the table base it become clear that only a few >people will ba able to afford the material (and the bandwidth to retrieve it) to >store and used thoses databases. > >I know there already one (at least) web service that allow clients to get the bm >for the 3-4-5-men egtb. I think that this kind of service for the 6-men table >base will become a must. Maybe the chess software vendors like ChessBases will >provide such a service for the use of their software in the future. > >There is however little hope to see such a service free of charge to be used by >the freeware and amateurs programs. We would need a coop of programmer to pay >for the hardware and hosting or a generous donator wich is unlikely. > >MP This is a good idea and was thinking of doing such a thing as I have almost all the 6 man bases locally. Someone emailed me wanting to know if I _would_ host such a system, as they are not a Shredder 9 customer and needed online access to the tablebases. There are some problems that I happening: 1. The bandwidth issue. This could become overly expensive. I would estimate that over 5-6 tb bandwidth/month is needed. That is easily a few hundred dollars a month just for data transfer. 2. While this is a free service to the amateur/freeware programmers, there is nothing to stop people with commecial products from using the service if "their" service is down, or our's is faster. There would have to be some sort of authentication system implemented. Also does this include the users of the freeware program? How do you regulate that? 3. Hardware. While this not a huge concern as you can get drives cheap through ebay. The ram will be important. You will need LOADS of it. 4. Lag. If the server is lagging due to usage, or you are on a bad connection, the service will fail you. Playing short time control games will almost certainly need just the 5 man locally, and poll the 6 man "when needed". Anything else and your engine will lose on time waiting for the move to come from the server in critical time situations. I currently have 3 webservers that I am converting into one. There is not enough traffic(and customers) between all three to use the alloted bandwidth and is a waste of money. I would be willing to host it and see just what the costs are going to be. One of the boxes goes offline in 5 days when the last remaining customer's account expires and I move it to the other server. The second one goes offline on the 15th. With the 4 drives currently in those boxes, and an 300gb drive I have here I can create a raid system with all the bases I have (and can easily download the rest today) and have it online towards the end of the month. Peter
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