[CF-Devel] Most criticial computer component to crossfire?

[Mark Wedel]

Peter Mardahl wrote:
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      > What is the most critical computer component to crossfire RAM? CPU? Both?
     
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      Crossfire typically consumes < 50M of RAM, so if you have more
     
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      than that, RAM isn't your problem.
     
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      However, if you don't have enough RAM, your CPU is irrelevant.
     
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      I would:  a)  Make sure there's enough ram (probably 256 would be way
     
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      more than needed.)
     
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      b)  Get a fast CPU.    OR>
     
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      c)  Get the crossfire developers to waste less CPU power.  I believe
     
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          there are areas where we could get a factor of more than two.
     
     
 I don't have a lot to add.  Crossfire does not take a lot of ram, so as long as
the system is not paging, not a big deal there.  However, a few notes:

 crossfire does load and save stuff to/from disk now and again.  For most any
modern system, i/o performance is plenty fine, but if you had really slow i/o,
that could be a problem.

 Once you get the memory so it doesn't page, cpu it what becomes useful.

 Note however it depends what else the machine may be doing.  If the program is
compiled on the same machine as it runs, then presumably you want to make sure
there is enough ram so it doesn't swap during the compile process or other
development work.

 there are lots of room for improvement in crossfire.  AT some point, I hope to
make it threaded - in this way, multiple cpu's will actually help performance,
and it also means that one really large map to be loaded/saved won't freeze the
entire server, as that will be in its own thread.