Re: Use Less RAM!

From: Daniel Koepke (dkoepke@CALIFORNIA.COM)
Date: 02/20/98


On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, George wrote:

->As has already been pointed out, it makes the system think it's not using
->as much RAM.  Why not extend the idea and compress your room descriptions?
->Or implement your own disk swapper?  You could get really fancy and write
->your own memory management subsystem.  Why stop there? A MUD kernel!

Why stop there?  Well, my answer, to be perfectly blunt is: because
it's a waste of time to even get there.  After completing this part of
the message, I copied it to a text file and checked its size; then
compressed it with gzip (-9) and checked its size again.  The results
are:

  Before compression: 267 bytes
  After compression : 203 bytes
  Savings           :  64 bytes

Now, admittedly, some room descriptions are longer than the four line
one above; but others are smaller.  So, I think it's a good average
length for room descriptions.  Now, let's say we have 6000 rooms on
our MUD (I don't know what most people have; I suspect more,
but...<shrug>), we get,

  Without compression: 1.6mb
  With compression   : 1.2mb
  Estimated savings  : 400k

We save a whole 400k in in-memory room descriptions according to the
above; which isn't a lot considering that we don't factor in the space
we loose by adding in the lines of code to do in-memory compression
comparable to what "gzip -9" does.  You could probably squeeze a lot
more memory out of the MUD by removing all of those weapons your
immortals created for themselves...:P~

-dak


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