questions about 6 man tablebases and engine launch times

[smirobth]

I have noticed that when using 6 man tablebases some engines launch very slowly, while others are very quick. For example in one trial I ran Fritz 10 launched in less than 1 second, Rybka 2.3.2 took 1 minute 17 seconds to start up, and Shredder 10 UCI took 5 minutes 19 seconds. Because of this enormous discrepancy in launch times I find myself always using Fritz when I want to take a quick look at an endgame position. But why this huge difference in start-up times? Is there a way to speed up the slow pokes (short of disabling 6 man tablebases)? I am using all the 3-4-5 tablebases and about 250GB of the 6-man and am using the Chessbase 9 GUI. If I got the full set of 6-man tablebases would start up times become even longer?

[Chuck Wilson]

I suppose Shredder is scanning and indexing all of the tablebase files on launch which I also guess you have already figured as well.

One thing I do to speed up the launch of the CB GUI is turn off tablebases for the GUI, but leave them on for the engine. This affects the Shredder GUI as well.

Another option, and I think this is best for playing strength and loading speed, is to use Shredder 10 with his 3-4-5 piece endgame bitbases loaded in memory (preferably the big set if you have the RAM for it) and then only point to the 6-piece tablebases. I haven't checked this to see how much faster it is, but hopefully it works out for you.

Cheers,

Chuck