I am not talking that you personally are in competition with someone, but an engine using Syzygy might be in direct competition with an engine using Nalimov, and if one consumes GBs of RAM freely, then allow the other engine, for example, to use more Hash. There is resources competition.syzygy wrote: I'm not in any way in competition with Eugene Nalimov. The concept of "fairness" seems to be foreign to the present topic.
I just did a partially conclusive test with Komodo 7a which shows that Syzygy on RAMDisk are a bit better than on HDD.If you have (literally) more than enough RAM then sure, but in general no. Nalimov files are also cached in the page cache (and then separately decompressed in the engine's TB cache). Loading them on RAM disk will help during the first accesses (it will not take much time to copy some relevant parts from RAM disk into the page cache) but not in the long run (RAM available for the page cache will be much smaller).
1/ Direct match K7a Syzygy RAM against K7a Syzygy HDD, partly conclusive:
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1'+1'' on one core
MES400.epd endgame suite
1. K7a Syzygy RAM 515.0/1000 310-280-410
2. K7a Syzygy HDD 415.0/1000 280-510-410
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Syzygy RAM: 373/400 3:12
Syzygy HDD: 364/400 4:04