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GNU Go Documentation

2.2.1 Ram Cache

By default, GNU Go makes a cache of 16 Megabytes in RAM for its internal use. The cache is used to store intermediate results during its analysis of the position.

Increasing the cache size will often give a modest speed improvement. If your system has lots of RAM, consider increasing the cache size. But if the cache is too large, swapping will occur, causing hard drive accesses and degrading performance. If your hard drive seems to be running excessively your cache may be too large. On GNU/Linux systems, you may detect swapping using the program 'top'. Use the 'f' command to toggle SWAP display.

You may override the size of the default cache at compile time by running one of:

./configure --enable-cache-size=n

to set the cache size to n megabytes. For example

./configure --enable-cache-size=32

creates a cache of size 32 megabytes. If you omit this, your default cache size will be 8 MB. You must recompile and reinstall GNU Go after reconfiguring it by running make and make install.

You may override the compile-time defaults by running gnugo with the option `--cache-size n', where n is the size in megabytes of the cache you want, and `--level' where n is the level desired. We will discuss setting these parameters next in detail.