bsnes upx'd?

Y~K · Post by **Y~K** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:22 pm

This message is for byuu and I post here because I'm too lazy to search a bsnes forum and register.

byuu don't upx bsnes
an upx'd application performances are much lower than a raw binary.
if you need to lower bw usage, use 7zip

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:49 pm

Use: "upx -d bsnes.exe"

Bandwidth costs money, and UPX+ZIP saves bandwidth.

Meanwhile, anyone with a PC that can get even ~5fps with bsnes will open the program instantaneously -- making the compression irrelevent. Performace after startup decompression is identical.

I'm not going to require users to download 7zip. Every copy of Windows sans the 9x series it won't run on, comes with built-in ZIP decompression.

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:53 pm

Y~K, there is no bsnes forum.

As for not having zip compression... I know ME will decompress zips. >.>

Y~K · Post by **Y~K** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:15 pm

byuu wrote:Performace after startup decompression is identical.

That's incorrect, it will eat up much more memory than a raw binary during the whole use.

Besides I think a 7zipped binary could possibly be smaller than upx+zip.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:34 pm

That's incorrect, it will eat up much more memory than a raw binary during the whole use.

You mean 6.2MB instead of 6.0MB? :/

Besides I think a 7zipped binary could possibly be smaller than upx+zip.

A lot less people have 7zip decompressors than zip decompressors ... that's the main problem with that.

Post by **pagefault** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:44 pm

UPX doesn't make it perform slower, it just increases the memory usage and load time since it's has to be extracted into memory but it has no performance hits once the application is running.

Y~K · Post by **Y~K** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:27 pm

byuu wrote:You mean 6.2MB instead of 6.0MB? :/

You probably have a cache problem.
My testing while running FF4J (v1.0).

upx'd

raw

22.1 MiB vs 4.7 MiB

And the gap will increase as the application grow bigger.
For MAME binaries, memory usage is far above 100MBytes.

pagefault wrote:UPX doesn't make it perform slower, it just increases the memory usage

Increasing the memory usage has a direct effect on performance. The more memory, the slower.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:39 pm

Right, and you plan on using BSNES on a system with less than 128MB of RAM? That's the only time when mem usage actually matters.. when you don't have enough.

Post by **pagefault** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 10:10 pm

Y~K wrote:Increasing the memory usage has a direct effect on performance. The more memory, the slower.

Only when you don't have that memory in the system. Otherwise it has no effect at all on performance. To demonstrate you can make a hello world app and malloc 2gb of ram to it, it's not going to run any slower just because it's using more memory, provided you have that much in your system.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 10:21 pm

With Star Ocean loaded, played up to the name select screen:

And for what it's worth, something is wrong with your task manager. bsnes.exe consumes ~14.5MB upon initial load with no games open. ~4.5MB is impossible ... I don't care what your task manager says. There are lookup tables between the S-PPU and memory bus alone that total more than that. They are constructed immediately upon startup, rather than during each game load.

Only when you don't have that memory in the system. Otherwise it has no effect at all on performance.

Precisely.

However, if UPX really consumed ~15MB of extra memory, I actually would remove it. But that is not the case. It only consumes extra memory worth the size of the compressed executable. This is because the compressed binary itself is loaded by Windows into an address space that cannot be written to by the UPX decompressor (0x401000+)
... and even if it could, it would require copying the decompressed program right on top of that data again (since you have to decompress to a separate buffer than your compressed one for obvious reasons), which would be slower and pointless.

Post by **pagefault** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:37 pm

What is funny is people complaining about 25 mb of RAM usage. I hope they don't use firefox.

Y~K · Post by **Y~K** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:09 am

stop gloating pf, your PC sucks

besides FF usage of memory is relative to available memory

about bsnes I tested again and still got the same result, you may have a cache problem. no problem thought, I now have a copy of upx in my bsnes folder and I will live with decompressing myself every update.

Post by **pagefault** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:14 am

You mean when you have 256mb of memory it uses 800mb? Relative in that way?

Panzer88 · Post by **Panzer88** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:16 am

couldn't this easily be solved by offering both?

in other words

bsnes (same as before)
bsnes source

and

bsnes 7z

would this really be a problem? it wouldn't cost you any more bandwidth.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:58 am

Panzer88 wrote:couldn't this easily be solved by offering both?

...

would this really be a problem? it wouldn't cost you any more bandwidth.

It would require more storage space (I only have ~2-5MB) and would take more of my time. But it wouldn't eat up much more bandwidth ... really, only a few people (and bots) would fetch both.

But then, it's not a problem in the first place.

Y~K runs a 1MB ROM, on an emulator that uses ~800kb for the executable, 2MB for the S-PPU lighting tables, 2MB for the video output surface, ~512kb for the video output color lookup tables, ~256kb for the bus memory indexing tables, 128k for CPU WRAM, 64k for PPU VRAM, 64k for APU RAM, not to mention the rest of the code's allocations, and his explorer reports that bsnes is only using ~4.7MB of memory ... yet he wants me to believe that the problem is with my computer's caching ... :/

It's only affecting him, and he said he would upx -d the executable. That will in turn save me a lot of time per release, so we'll go with that. Further, it's actually been tested by a few people before ... applications actually start up faster with UPX on modern PCs, because loading a smaller amount from disk and decompressing is faster than loading a larger amount from disk.

Sorry, Y~K, I do value your input, so I don't mean to seem rude about the issue. But you do have an easy workaround, so ...

sweener2001 · Post by **sweener2001** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:59 am

it can be solved by ignoring it, since it has been shown to be a non-issue.

i'm going to trust byuu's results with pf's backup.

even if it took that much more RAM, like they said, it shouldn't matter because it's not like bsnes is making you run out of RAM.

Panzer88 · Post by **Panzer88** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 1:02 am

didn't mean to come across as untrusting, I just like to look for win-win situations but it doesn't really bother me either way.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 1:03 am

Panzer88 wrote:didn't mean to come across as untrusting, I just like to look for win-win situations but it doesn't really bother me either way.

Nah, not at all. It was a good idea for a compromise. In truth, if I had lots of bandwidth, or an SF account or something, I wouldn't mind sticking the raw EXE in a ZIP file to begin with. Or offer two separate files. It only adds ~200kb onto the ZIP file.

Y~K · Post by **Y~K** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 1:10 am

no problem byuu, you're still the greatest snes hero in my book

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 2:48 am

Y~K wrote:about bsnes I tested again and still got the same result, you may have a cache problem. no problem thought, I now have a copy of upx in my bsnes folder and I will live with decompressing myself every update.

what makes you think us have the problem?

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 3:39 am

Y~K wrote:stop gloating pf, your PC sucks
besides FF usage of memory is relative to available memory

I've had FF use 70 megs out of 256. That's a hell of a large chunk percentage wise.

Rydian · Post by **Rydian** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 3:51 am

byuu wrote:[... applications actually start up faster with UPX on modern PCs, because loading a smaller amount from disk and decompressing is faster than loading a larger amount from disk.

Stupid moving parts slowing our machines down. T_T

blargg · Post by **blargg** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:25 am

I too think program-level compression is stupid (since it prevents the OS from doing intelligent things with paging a program in), but since the end-user can un-upx a program, I agree that bsnes should be UPX'd. After all, if you don't like UPX, just treat it as a compression format like ZIP where you have to decompress before using. Why the hell should it be in two formats when one is sufficient?

Panzer88 · Post by **Panzer88** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 6:14 am

blargg wrote:I too think program-level compression is stupid (since it prevents the OS from doing intelligent things with paging a program in), but since the end-user can un-upx a program, I agree that bsnes should be UPX'd. After all, if you don't like UPX, just treat it as a compression format like ZIP where you have to decompress before using. Why the hell should it be in two formats when one is sufficient?

how do you do it?

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 6:23 am

open a command prompt and type upx /? might help you.