Developer update: 275% improved game compression

thumbs up, well done.
In case of interest, i am using software raid (zfs) which uses lzo compression by default, but allows for easy recovery (raid-6 instead of raid-1). using it since many years now and appreciating the comfortable administration and versatility.

What about variant games? Are these also encoded with the new mechanism? Can there be a variant with more than 256 moves? For example horde with more than 9 queens? @revoof

@SlowSlug Good choice. For our MongoDB cluster it's probably not ideal, because the database itself also supports compression. Our next servers will use RAID 10 (in hardware) and XFS (recommended by MongoDB docs).

@MasterCassim Intresting question. I am not sure if you can beat the 256 move limit in Horde. It's definitely not enough for Crazyhouse, where you can drop all kinds of different pieces on all the empty squares. We made the practical choice to not use the new compression for variant games at all (98% of games are standard anyway).

@V1chess There's no schedule for updates of the master database. The games were curated by @tonyro.

@revoof Thanks for the answer; I was just curious. Makes sense to only use the compression for standard games.

Ok, I thought they update automatically.

Could that be done in the future?

It all makes sense now!! (not really lmao)

Thanks for the update tho <3

@revoof @MasterCassim
Yes, there are horde positions with more than 256 legal moves. I had not observed any issues with that in Stockfish, but since I found artificially constructed positions like lichess.org/analysis/horde/knQQQQQQ/pn5Q/Q6Q/Q6Q/Q6Q/Q6Q/Q6Q/QQQQQQQQ_w_-_-_0_1, I increased the limit in SF to be on the safe side (github.com/ddugovic/Stockfish/commit/e8b0a3a50d73135833becbb663def04d02e204b7 ).

@V1chess If we find a reliable machine-readable source, then yes.

@ubdip Thanks, that's an evil position :D

This is brilliant stuff!! Congratulations @thibault and team for such amazing work.