Database Develop

Performance on Chess

Hi,
I'm choosing a phone for my father who's hobby is a chess. The best chess program for Android is probably Droidfish. It is based on one of the fastest, free and opensource (GPL3) chess engines, called Stockfish. Performance in Chess depends mostly on CPU integer manipulation speed and memory system speed (RAM, RAM caches). Chess program scale very well on to multiple CPU core machines (at least on PC). So when I noticed the price of LG O2X is similar to HTC Desire S which I intended to buy for him (because I have good experience with original HTC Desire), I got intrigued by two cores. Can somebody do a performance test on Chess for me? Exact steps are below.
Step to measure:
1) Install Droidfish: https://market.android.com/details?id=org.petero.droidfish
(there are several clones in the market, but this one comes from author of the UI, Peter Österlund, see here http://web.comhem.se/petero2home/droidfish/index.html )
2) Run Droidfish
3) Press menu button, invoke "Settings", activate option "Show computer thinking" in "Hints" section. Press back button.
4) There is button with label "M" below chess board. Press it. Choose "Analysis Mode". Analysis will start. Keep it running for about 1 minute. You can watch time in "t:" field in status at the botom, but it updates only occasionally.
5) After 1 minute passed, read "nps:" field in status. This is the measurement I'm interested in. On my HTC Desire I get values in range of 80000 to 90000. This value is a number of positions searched per second. Higher is better. This number depends on position (we used initial position; some positions are faster to search) and depth searched.
6) To force program to stop thinking, press "M" button again, choose "Two players" so that analysis will stop.
Unfortunately, the test is not repeatable since chess engine remembers previous findings which may affect the speed. If you want to repeat the test, go to Android's main settings, choose "Application", then "Manage Applications", find Droidfish, press "Force stop", press "Clear data" and confirm. You can repeat test now.
Thank you in advance for measuring!

Attached screenshot of Droidfish.
I am running CyanogenMod 7 Nightly, it might be faster on other roms, who knows

Hi
did get 101527 in first attempt after 60 seconds
second attempt gave me 102200, again after 60 seconds
im on FR13 Modaco Rom

I got 102628, on CM nightly 1

About 102k+ on stock firmware (v10b), unrooted.
That was fun

me too about 102500 is the lowest score and about 103200 is the highest score.
Running rooted stock rom with pauls tweaks/patches.

Thank you all for measurements.
So values are
HTC Desire - about 84000 nps
HTC Desire S - about 90000 nps (I measured once in HTC shop)
LG Optimus 2x - about 102000 nps
All of these processors run at 1GHz. But that can process different number of instructions per cycle. These values are expected as Desire S has very slightly improved processor and single core of Optimus 2x is slightly better at that as well according to what I have read about the processor. But it also means that the program is unable to use two cores.
With two cores, I would expect values like 140000 to 170000 nps (based on how these programs scale to multiple cores on PC). I don't know why two cores are not used. The support for more cores is quite new in Droidfish (Changelog entry indicates: "2011-01-02: Version 1.26 - Made stockfish use all available CPU cores"). And probably untested on variety of phones. Code to detect number of processors is also strange (DroidFish/src/org/petero/droidfish/engine/DroidComputerPlayer.java, where method getNumCPUs() gets number of processor by parsing /proc/stat ). Maybe it has something to do with only Android 2.2 not fully supporting multi core CPUs. So it might be interesting to retest once update to 2.4 is available. Or is there any expert on multicore programs in the 2x with different explanation?

Android 2.2 supports several cores, contrary to popular belief. Single-threaded apps (that'd be most crap on Market) won't do too good however. The issue in this case I'd say is because of suboptimal LG firmware (which no doubt will be improved with LG's implementation of Android 2.3).
These are my figures using another ROM, based on LG stock Android 2.2; Modaco ROM for LG Optimus 2x.
It is not overclocked.

drcorwe said:
Android 2.2 supports several cores, contrary to popular belief. Single-threaded apps (that'd be most crap on Market) won't do too good however. The issue in this case I'd say is because of suboptimal LG firmware (which no doubt will be improved with LG's implementation of Android 2.3).
These are my figures using another ROM, based on LG stock Android 2.2; Modaco ROM for LG Optimus 2x.
It is not overclocked.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow, you have got the result I expected from using both cores. 195k nps is great.
Modaco ROM must be good! At least it reports numbers of cores in /proc/stat in a way that Droidfish succesfully parses and allows to run multiple threads of the same process on both cores.
Edit: just for a comparison, since measurement was done later than 1 minute, I ran the test until I got about 24 million positions ("n:" label), it took 274 seconds on HTC Desire (87506 nps). So O2x is 2.25x faster the Desire.

Updated screenshot. Force stop droidfish->clear data->reboot phone.
Ran for 60s.

I tried this on a Samsung Galaxy S2, 250,000-266,000!

Screenshots?

Here goes:

[Q] Windows Phone 8 Ram Vs android Ram

Hi ,
I have andorid right now , and looking forward to buy an windows phone 8.
i have android having 512 mb ram. im looking forward to buy Nokia lumia 520. also have 512 ram.
i want to know how much the windows phone allow to use ram. will all apps will work on it like on android. doesnt matter , i only want some apps like viber , whats app and fb to work in background.
Should i buy ram 512 mb phone ?

shanalikhan said:
Hi ,
I have andorid right now , and looking forward to buy an windows phone 8.
i have android having 512 mb ram. im looking forward to buy Nokia lumia 520. also have 512 ram.
i want to know how much the windows phone allow to use ram. will all apps will work on it like on android. doesnt matter , i only want some apps like viber , whats app and fb to work in background.
Should i buy ram 512 mb phone ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if "to work in background" means you want to get push notificiations then: yes and no. windows phone 8's push service is a mess, even if your phone had 512GB of RAM, facebook won't push anything.

Eh? The WP7 version of Facebook did push just fine with 512MB. Not sure about the WP8 version but it *could* work.
Facebook and Twitter and so on will do their integration thing just fine without apps or push notifications anyhow.
With that said, there are definitely apps that won't run on 512MB WP8 devices, but not many, and they're mostly the really big fancy graphically intensive games that the Lumia 520's CPU/GPU would probably struggle with anyhow (not sure if you're aware, but it's basically the entry-level WP8 device).

GoodDayToDie said:
Eh? The WP7 version of Facebook did push just fine with 512MB. Not sure about the WP8 version but it *could* work.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The push service of the facebook app was (and still is) a horrible mess. It generally worked, with the exception of message notifications. I never received any message notifications at all, only if someone liked my status, posted in a group etc. Those worked reliable, though.

i heard the in Wp8 , developers are more attracted to set 1GB rams for ther applications. later on they set to 512mb.
so should i buy wp8 with 512mb ? will it run about 85-90% apps ?

512ram on WP8 is like 1gb ram on android its not like android when you run apps just press back until it gets to homescreen and it close all process and it didnt get slow!

how many apps in market is able to run on wp8 , can you estimate , 60% , 70% or 90%
I have htc explorer right now and its working fine on 512mb

Probably well over 90% of apps will run on 512MB phones. The 1GB restriction is mostly only present for high-end games.

There were a few instances of regular Apps not being able to work on 512 MB devices but those got fixed in an update quickly and mostly affected Apps just updated from WP7 to an optimized WP8 version and that had opted out of 256 MB devices on WP7 (so I suppose they forgot to take the limit entry out - it meant "no 256 MB devices" in WP7 but in a WP8-App the same entry limits it to 1 GB devices). Aside from that as has already been said it mostly affected games and quite a lot have been updated to work on 512 MB as well (Asphalt 7 and Temple Run are 2 notable examples).
As for background processing. 180 MB is the maximum a WP8 App may use on 512 MB devices (it was limited to 90 MB max on WP7). There is a set amount of background tasks that can be configured to run that is dependent on the device but regularly scales with the amount of memory available. Apps that are not in the foreground are dormant and are removed from memory if a more recently used App requires the memory. Many Apps like WhatsApp do employ the push service which does not require the actual App to run in the background so those aren't affected by the limitations outlined above.

Phone 8
WP 8 handles less RAM better than Android. This correspondes to the better optimation of the OS.

[Q] Slow startup

I have an Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz system with 24 GB of ram and it takes about 3-5 minutes to start Android Studio after clicking on the icon on the Desktop. I am running the latest Windows 8.1 OS.
Has anybody seen something like this? It didn't used to be so bad. I've been using it for about one year, from beta to the current stable release. Are there any fixes I can do to help this out? Maybe uninstalling and installing again?

It is the same in all Android Studio versions

adam_beers said:
I have an Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz system with 24 GB of ram and it takes about 3-5 minutes to start Android Studio after clicking on the icon on the Desktop. I am running the latest Windows 8.1 OS.
Has anybody seen something like this? It didn't used to be so bad. I've been using it for about one year, from beta to the current stable release. Are there any fixes I can do to help this out? Maybe uninstalling and installing again?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the same issue too, a Intel i7-2.4G + 8GB RAM, the starting of Android Studio is very slow, taking about 5 minutes. After the slow starting, it works good when editing source code.
The latest version Android Studio 1.3 isn't very good for everyday use.

adam_beers said:
I have an Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz system with 24 GB of ram and it takes about 3-5 minutes to start Android Studio after clicking on the icon on the Desktop. I am running the latest Windows 8.1 OS.
Has anybody seen something like this? It didn't used to be so bad. I've been using it for about one year, from beta to the current stable release. Are there any fixes I can do to help this out? Maybe uninstalling and installing again?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It seems to have a lot to do with the damn indexing it does.
I resorted to killing the indexing services in windows process explorer and it seemed to speed the project load up some what.
I was having problems with being able to re-load a newly created project. But it was probably because the IDE was bogged down in indexing and just had not finished.
The developers need to add a means of disabling this indexing because it is a pain!
At one stage it was taking me 30 seconds or more to enter a friggin image asset id - I don't know what that was about but it was damned infuriating.
No other programming related software I have ever used has had these problems.

Android Studio crashes a lot

I have been having almost daily Android Studio crashes. I am on version 1.4, it happened on 1.3. Earlier versions would still crash but less often. Is there anything that can be done to reduce these? I have increased memory limits via studio64.exe.vmoptions
-Xms1024m
-Xmx3072m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=225m
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=50
Running Win7 with 16 GB RAM and an SSD for system drive. When I open, it shows it using about 1.4 GB in Task Manager. There are no errors shown it just silently crashes randomly while editing code.

ROM boot using Emulator

Looking to find a way to boot a zip.file ROM using Virtual Machine Ubuntu 14.4 LTS. Meaning is there a way to test a ROM before sending it to a device for flashing. Using the virtual machine to do the test run it self.

I dont think so... If you have one of those OTG cables, just copy zip to flashdrive and test it in multirom, so in case it wont work You'll be able to revert changes instantly

Rondeau7 said:
Looking to find a way to boot a zip.file ROM using Virtual Machine Ubuntu 14.4 LTS. Meaning is there a way to test a ROM before sending it to a device for flashing. Using the virtual machine to do the test run it self.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You would have to emulate a N5, which is not possible

Even using and SDK emulator? There are programs that emulate andriod on a PC platform.

Rondeau7 said:
Even using and SDK emulator? There are programs that emulate andriod on a PC platform.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The problem there is that such emulators can't boot ROMs for the real device.
I have an emulated 5x at my beck right now - it is running Oreo, in fact - and even includes Pixel Launcher. However, if I threw it at a real 5x, it would balk, because it's built on the Intel architecture, and requires HAXM to even run (which is not true of a real 5x), and thus would balk when confronted with same. I'm not saying that emulation is not a slick piece of work - it is, and I've said so multiple times. The emulated 5x is, if anything, far slicker than is supposed to be possible - first off, the real 5x is a quad-core ARM CPU, and the emulated version is running on a dual-core Intel Pentium G3258 (in short, it doesn't even have the virtual two extra cores of the Core i3 at its beck); however, it not only runs, it is, in fact, FASTER than MEMuPLAY - a purpose-built Android emulator for the Windows OS - which runs Lollipop. I chose it because it's a standard AVD that is included with the current version of Android Studio - no shens whatever. (It even includes the Play Store - so you can - literally - treat it as a real device otherwise; this is something that Google got seriously pounded over - and especially compared to Microsoft/Xamarin and Genymotion); if you happen to actually HAVE a 5x, you can import the AVD's configuration to it - just like you could that of a genuine 5x.