xboard - delay between games?

[cyberfish]

I suspected this is a frequently asked question but I can't find any references from Google. The xboard documentation doesn't say anything related to this either.

xboard inserts s ~10 seconds delay between games in a match between two engines. Is there any way to eliminate that? It wastes a large proportion of time when running very fast matches.

If not, can someone suggest another GUI for this purpose (engine against engine matches) on Linux that doesn't have this delay? What is this delay for anyways?

Thanks

[sje]

There is no option for this; you'll have to change the source and rebuild.

[cyberfish]

Thanks for the information.

For other people interested, the line to change is line 5224 in backend.c (of the latest version - 4.2.7)

ScheduleDelayedEvent(NextMatchGame, 10000);

Change 10000 to the delay you want in milliseconds. I tried 0 and it works fine. I don't know why it was there in the first place, though, so their may be side effects that I am not aware of.

Works fine for me and my engine, though (tested 50 "0 1" games).

There is still a ~1 second delay between games (and I don't know where that came from), but I am less concerned with that.

[Zach Wegner]

There is an option for this in newer xboard versions (4.3.x), the "-matchPause" option.

[hgm]

The option

-matchPause N

sets the pause between matches to N msec. Only values between 10 msec and 10 sec are accepted; if you give something outside of that range, the default of 10 sec is used.