Cache with huge database?

[fmny]

My Omaha database has 4 million hands. Can I create a PAHUD cache with this and use the HUD? How many days is it going to take to create the cache if it can do so for a database this size? Is there anything that can be done to speed up the process? I'd be satisfied if it just used the last 10,000 hands for each player to create their statistics if that would speed it up.

[WhiteRider]

You should be able to create a cache, yes - I don't know how long it will take, though. The time depends on the speed of your processor and hard disk (and space) and memory.
Using the last X hands actually makes it slower because it can't use the cache for that.
Once you have built the cache, if you rebuild it regularly then it won't take so long, and once it is built it should really speed things up.
Note that if you have postgres 8.3 then the cache won't work as 8.3 is not fully supported by PAH.

[fmny]

It's been about 40 hours since I started building the cache. Is there a way to see that the cache really is being built and that the program isn't just frozen? Are there some temp files I can monitor and make sure are growing? I don't mind leaving this running for several days if necessary as long as I know progress is being made. Task manager shows 2 PAHUD.exe processes, one using 484k of memory, the other 7820k. The CPU usage on the first is always zero. The CPU usage on the second is zero most of the time but goes to 1% for a split second every minute or so. If that is really all the CPU being used to build this cache this will probably never finish.

[WhiteRider]

The cache files are C:\Program Files\PokerAce Hud\Data\Temp\DBCachexxx.* so you could see if they are increasing in size.
Do you have logging enabled?
If so, attach PAHud.log to a Support ticket and we'll see any problems are reported - I don't think the progress of the cache is written to it, though.
I'll ask whether there's anything else you can look at, but for a big DB like that it will take a while so I would leave it running for now.

[fmny]

There is one tmp file in that directory. It is 11kb in size and dated from last Saturday at 6pm, which is when I started the cache building process. That doesn't look good. Is there anything else that could be causing problems? I'm using vista and postgres 8.2.x. Should I start it over with logging enabled or does logging not help with this.

[WhiteRider]

Logging won't make it work, but enable it and send us the log file and we'll see if it shows anything.

[APerfect10]

You are running out of memory when building the cache. PAH used an inefficient caching method which essentially dumped all of the hands to memory.

You will need to split your database into more manageable sizes (dependent on how much RAM you have) and then cache the databases.

Best regards,

Derek

[fmny]

Good news. It worked this time. I ran the vacuum/index first and also defragged my hard drive to make things easier on the computer. Nine hours later I had a cache built. Next test will be to update the cache but I'm not going to press my luck for now.

[WhiteRider]

I would expect updating the cache to be easier on your computer because it is only making updates, not building the full thing all at once, but I don't know for sure.