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 +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: | | http://democracy.queensu.ca/~fletcher/Circle/list-faq.html | +------------------------------------------------------------+
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