Banksia GUI released

[RubiChess]

BanksiaGUI would be great if it wouldn't be unstable like hell (e.g. by grabbing/leaking lots of memory) and bugs would be fixed without introducing new ones.

[Wilhelm]

BanksiaGUI would be great if it wouldn't be unstable like hell (e.g. by grabbing/leaking lots of memory) and bugs would be fixed without introducing new ones.

I can not confirm what you say. I run over 700000 games and the GUI is pretty stable. When I have problems than only with some engines that also make problems in other GUI's. Maybe your PC is not stable enough when running 20 engines parallel or so. And the memory usage is less than half as Fritz-GUI. It uses a bit more when running a tournament with 20 games parallel because I think she had to handle a lot. Most memory is used by the hashtables of the engines.



For me there are only two points that needs urgent updates:
A clearly sorting of games in a tournament round by round (1 game white and 1 game black against each opponent)
Average solve time in test suites is total garbage and some engines simply doesn't start

Wilhelm

[Uri Blass]

BanksiaGUI would be great if it wouldn't be unstable like hell (e.g. by grabbing/leaking lots of memory) and bugs would be fixed without introducing new ones.

I can confirm from experience that banksia crashed often when I tried to do things faster and use concurrency that is bigger than 1.
The problem is that not only that banksia crashed but it did not memorize the last setting I had and when I tried to run banksia again
and wanted to play the tournament in multi-mode again or continue it there are cases that I needed to change time id of some engines back to what they were earlier and also needed to change the time id table.

My conclusion from experience is that banksia is more stable if I use only concurrency that is equal to 1 but of course there is a price and the price is that games take more time.

Even with concurrency that is only 1 when engines used only one thread there were some cases when the gui seemed to have problems and did not respond for some minutes(in one case I decided to look at the task manager and found that some engines that were not supposed to play in the tournament were running and simply end their task and end the banksia task and ran banksia again).

In another case I did not see something strange in the task mangar and the engines continue to play the tournament but the interface got stuck for some minutes and I could see nothing and only after some minutes I could enter the interface to see that some games of the tournament are already finished.

[AlexChess]

I'm using Banksiagui every day on Lichess and on tournaments of more than 70 engines, never losing my data, since there is n internal backup/restore of all previous tuornaments. Even if not perfect is much better than the rudimental Cutechess, Hiarcs and Shredder prehistoric guis, Arena and Chessbase Frtz GUI (that loses even the engine UCI settings *I must hardcode them on ProteusSF* with Playchess showing incorrect (1620 recursive) and missing ELO on the main frame with all accounts ratings, lets to draw in lost positions, loses draw games due to tablebases bugs choosing the wrong move, and so on. All reported to Chessbase that absolutely doesn't care or even answer to the emails and I have paid 99€ for Chessbase Dragon 3.2 never updated to 3.3 )

So I'm just returned to offline tournaments on BanksiuaGUI 0.58c with great pleasure and I'm available to betatest all Pham fixes

[RubiChess]

BanksiaGUI would be great if it wouldn't be unstable like hell (e.g. by grabbing/leaking lots of memory) and bugs would be fixed without introducing new ones.

I can not confirm what you say. I run over 700000 games and the GUI is pretty stable. When I have problems than only with some engines that also make problems in other GUI's. Maybe your PC is not stable enough when running 20 engines parallel or so. And the memory usage is less than half as Fritz-GUI.

My PC is rock stable running other GUIs and any other software.
Starting BanksiaGUI it takes 4.6GB memory displayed in Windows taskmanager even before any engine is running.
Starting tournaments this memory usage grows until finally the PC starts to swap, slows down and finally Bangsia crashes.
My guess is that Banksia GUI loads opening books and/or Syzygy table bases into memory even before using them and that Banksia has memory leaks in that corner.

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

My PC is rock stable running other GUIs and any other software.
Starting BanksiaGUI it takes 4.6GB memory displayed in Windows taskmanager even before any engine is running.
Starting tournaments this memory usage grows until finally the PC starts to swap, slows down and finally Bangsia crashes.
My guess is that Banksia GUI loads opening books and/or Syzygy table bases into memory even before using them and that Banksia has memory leaks in that corner.

And what application do you use to test your engine or other chess engines.

[Wilhelm]

A good way to start is Prime95 (latest versions that support AVX2, AVX512...).
Download here: https://www.mersenne.org/download/
The test must be set to use all cores, hyperthreading on and use "Small FFTs" maximum power, heat, CPU stress.
Using the "Blend" test pushes your CPU not to the limits.
The test should run over night without errors or you will have problems running 20 AVX-engines parallel.

After one correction in my Bios I run a tournament with 20 AVX engines parallel over 3 days without a single problem.

Wilhelm

[RubiChess]

And what application do you use to test your engine or other chess engines.

Usually Cutechess-cli.
When I need a GUI: Arena (accepting its bugs) or Cutechess-GUI (accepting its limited functions).

[RubiChess]

A good way to start is Prime95 (latest versions that support AVX2, AVX512...).
Download here: https://www.mersenne.org/download/

As I said, my PC is rock stable, no need for stress-testing.
An application taking more and more memory and finally crashing because there isn't more memory available is not the hardware's fault.

[AlexChess]

Hi Pham,

Thanks for the reply, although I expected him to answer.

The guy said: 'Banksiagui is far better than Fritz 18, Cutechess and Arena on tournament management.'

And while Arena may not support all kinds of tournaments, its tournament management is excellent and very easy to use. To set up engines and tournament is a breeze with it.

I did use both and all I can say Banksia is too complicated for me so I have given up using it. Most of the tournament features you list are unnecessary for me. And, for example, I still don't know how to set up a gauntlet so that the rounds are numbered properly (once we have talked about that but I recall we had a misunderstanding and I have given up).
And I had problems with all those windows, I could never display what I wanted to see. Windows seemed to disappear arbitrarily and I could not bring them back. Again, Banksia is too complicated to use, IMO.

Maybe I will return to Banksia in the future when I have the patience to try to understand its workings. But, as I use these GUI's exclusively for playing tournaments for CCRL, Arena provides me with everything I need and in a very user-friendly way.

The guy says that is a waste of time to share chess infos with most of Talkchess users. due to their fake modesty and low respect for others opinions and different skills. The guy also says that he is returned to private offline tests of his modded GPLv3 engines publishing them only BanksiaGui forum