cutechess-cli 0.7.2

[Ferdy]

2. (windows) Make sure engines are killed along with CuteChess.
Now even with Control+break (was only control+C) keys to interrupt the running tour, engines are exited/quited/killed along with cutechess.

Will it also completely terminate processes still hogging memory?

Observing the memory usage of this current version (thru task manager and performance monitor) it looks normal to me. My system is win7.

I'm using 0.7.1 and the only tournament that really works is "match". As soon as you have 3 or more engines, both gauntlet and round-robin will ignore the "restart" parameter; no matter what option you specify, engines will be restarted,

I usually use gauntlet and don't use restart at all, meaning I am using the default, don't care much about that option. BTW when restart is on, engines will be restarted. Also during non-match, it is reasonable for cutechess-cli to terminate the engine after its scheduled game is over.

and the "terminated" processes will still be using memory:

Not sure about that, once a process is terminated, its allocated resources are freed.

- a few dozens will still be requiring the full 100% they peaked at (Working set as reported by Resource Monitor)

I can't understand that, could you make it more clearer?

[Ozymandias]

Observing the memory usage of this current version (thru task manager and performance monitor) it looks normal to me. My system is win7.

All of this, is happening under Win8 (not 8.1).

I usually use gauntlet and don't use restart at all, meaning I am using the default, don't care much about that option. BTW when restart is on, engines will be restarted. Also during non-match, it is reasonable for cutechess-cli to terminate the engine after its scheduled game is over.

I started using the default option, but switched to "off", when I saw tournaments ending prematurely. It didn't help not one bit.

Not sure about that, once a process is terminated, its allocated resources are freed.

Well, that's what I thought, too, but what other explanation could there be? When I start I tournament, I don't use the computer for anything else. The tournament in progress, started several days ago, and will probably "die" tonight (it's already gone from a mere gigabyte, to 14!).

- a few dozens will still be requiring the full 100% they peaked at (Working set as reported by Resource Monitor)

I can't understand that, could you make it more clearer?

When opening Resource Monitor, in the "Memory" tab, I can see several dozen greyed out processes, corresponding to the various engines in the tournament, that use as much memory as they did when they peaked while running (syzygy caching will cause "working set" values to raise).

[Ferdy]

Observing the memory usage of this current version (thru task manager and performance monitor) it looks normal to me. My system is win7.

All of this, is happening under Win8 (not 8.1).

I usually use gauntlet and don't use restart at all, meaning I am using the default, don't care much about that option. BTW when restart is on, engines will be restarted. Also during non-match, it is reasonable for cutechess-cli to terminate the engine after its scheduled game is over.

I started using the default option, but switched to "off", when I saw tournaments ending prematurely. It didn't help not one bit.

Not sure about that, once a process is terminated, its allocated resources are freed.

Well, that's what I thought, too, but what other explanation could there be? When I start I tournament, I don't use the computer for anything else. The tournament in progress, started several days ago, and will probably "die" tonight (it's already gone from a mere gigabyte, to 14!).

- a few dozens will still be requiring the full 100% they peaked at (Working set as reported by Resource Monitor)

I can't understand that, could you make it more clearer?

When opening Resource Monitor, in the "Memory" tab, I can see several dozen greyed out processes, corresponding to the various engines in the tournament, that use as much memory as they did when they peaked while running (syzygy caching will cause "working set" values to raise).

So these things happened to you when you use sy? I normally do not use it in my gauntlet tests.

I have 5-men sy, one time I used it for analysis, I observed a rising private bytes usage of the engine. Have a look here.

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 58&t=55846

[Ozymandias]

Yes, syzygy are involved, but they're a constant, I've been using them for almost a year now, under cutechess. The 5-men set is less than 400 MB, and never caused any trouble, provided that only two engines were in play. The thing that surprises me, is that running engines are restarted way before they've cached the whole set. They're usually below 100MB, and by looking at the Task Manager, I can't see where the memory went to. That's why I took a look with other tools, that report memory usage from non running processes. I think this is a problem with cutechess restarting engines, because under "match" conditions (two engines), engines weren't restarted if I chose so. They would go all the way to 400MB, but total memory usage would stay, well below the critical threshold.

[Ferdy]

Yes, syzygy are involved, but they're a constant, I've been using them for almost a year now, under cutechess. The 5-men set is less than 400 MB, and never caused any trouble, provided that only two engines were in play. The thing that surprises me, is that running engines are restarted way before they've cached the whole set. They're usually below 100MB, and by looking at the Task Manager, I can't see where the memory went to. That's why I took a look with other tools, that report memory usage from non running processes. I think this is a problem with cutechess restarting engines, because under "match" conditions (two engines), engines weren't restarted if I chose so. They would go all the way to 400MB, but total memory usage would stay, well below the critical threshold.

Check if this will describe your problem. Modify it if necessary.

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When cutechess-cli restarts the engine and that engine is using sy egtb, a memory is leaked.

If this is so, then we have a problem with the OS and sy. Cutechess is just restarting the engines.

[Ozymandias]

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The "restart" option doesn't have any effect on gauntlet and round-robin tournaments, at hyper-bullet and with engines using syzygy involved. When cutechess-cli restarts engines very fast, some processes aren't properly terminated and memory is leaked.

I'm running a match now, between two of the engines of the failed gauntlet from yesterday, and even though on "auto", there's some restarting going on, the total amount of memory used can be accounted for. There're no greyed out processes, reported by the Resource Monitor, anymore.

[Ferdy]

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The "restart" option doesn't have any effect on gauntlet and round-robin tournaments, at hyper-bullet and with engines using syzygy involved. When cutechess-cli restarts engines very fast, some processes aren't properly terminated and memory is leaked.

I'm running a match now, between two of the engines of the failed gauntlet from yesterday, and even though on "auto", there's some restarting going on, the total amount of memory used can be accounted for. There're no greyed out processes, reported by the Resource Monitor, anymore.

According to cutechess when restart is set to auto, it is the engine that will decide to restart.

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restart=MODE          Set the restart mode to MODE which can be:
                      'auto': the engine decides whether to restart (default)
                      'on': the engine is always restarted between games
                      'off': the engine is never restarted between games

For uci engines, normally it cannot quit itself, it needs gui command quit, for winboard engines it depends on the feature reuse value it sends to gui, can be 1 or 0.

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reuse (boolean, default 1, recommended 1)
If reuse=1, xboard may reuse your engine for multiple games. If reuse=0 (or if the user has set the -xreuse option on xboard's command line), xboard will kill the engine process after every game and start a fresh process for the next game.

So I guess auto is for winboard engines that sends feature reuse=0 or 1.

[Joerg Oster]

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The "restart" option doesn't have any effect on gauntlet and round-robin tournaments, at hyper-bullet and with engines using syzygy involved. When cutechess-cli restarts engines very fast, some processes aren't properly terminated and memory is leaked.

I'm running a match now, between two of the engines of the failed gauntlet from yesterday, and even though on "auto", there's some restarting going on, the total amount of memory used can be accounted for. There're no greyed out processes, reported by the Resource Monitor, anymore.

I'm always using the wait option.

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 -wait n
    Wait n milliseconds between games. The default is 0.

-wait 5 under Linux

[Ozymandias]

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The "restart" option doesn't have any effect on gauntlet and round-robin tournaments, at hyper-bullet and with engines using syzygy involved. When cutechess-cli restarts engines very fast, some processes aren't properly terminated and memory is leaked.

I'm running a match now, between two of the engines of the failed gauntlet from yesterday, and even though on "auto", there's some restarting going on, the total amount of memory used can be accounted for. There're no greyed out processes, reported by the Resource Monitor, anymore.

I'm always using the wait option.

Code: Select all

 -wait n
    Wait n milliseconds between games. The default is 0.

-wait 5 under Linux

I hope those are milliseconds.

[Ferdy]

Is it possible for someone to make this compatible with CuGen?

I hope Richard will update Cugen.

I am trying to create one, but not sure when to finish this, experimenting with layout.