Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

Sometimes I hear complaints on how slow Moyo Go is. That always enrages me :-)

Because Moyo Go is not slow. On the contrary, it is incredibly fast. The tricks used to get it so fast are so complex, that at the moment I don’t remember how half of them work, and I have to reverse-engineer them from the (comments in the) source.

So whence those occasional claims of totally-unusable slowliness? They are few but they exist and I take them seriously.

First of all, by all means ensure that there is at least 350 MB free for the program. If you have a machine with 512 MB and you run nothing else but Moyo Go, it still doesn’t mean there is 350 MB free. What you should do is Start - Run and type msconfig. On the Startup tab are usually a large number of totally useless applications, starting up with Windows. They come with the soundcard installer, with Adobe Acrobat etc. get rid of that crap - they use RAM. If you don’t know what something does, Google it or see what happens when you disable it.

A way to see how much memory running processes use is CTRL + SHIFT + ESC, and go to the Processes tab. Then View - Select Columns and choose Memory (working set). Then you’ll notice (as I now do) that Firefox likes to claim 350 whopping megabytes at the moment, on my machine!

When you’ve eliminated memory-starvation problems, go on to another very important issue: Bad NVIDIA screen card drivers. They are the single most common reason for slowing down Moyo Go. Update that driver. I had half a dozen customers who had their slowdown problem disappear that way.

Now we come to the game-import process. Again, this should be fairly quick with a limited number of games. When it isn’t, it is most likely an antivirus scanner. Moyo Go creates 4096 temporary files before it imports games. A virus scan of so many files can add a minute or more, perhaps, to the import process. You can temporarily disable a virus scanner to see if it makes any difference.