thibault edited #1 Thanks to the work of @revoof, lichess local analysis is now up to 40 times faster than it was yesterday!



We now use a special chrome/chromium technology called "NaCl", which allows much faster code execution, and supports multi-threading.



Here's the expected performance gains. If your computer has:



- 1 or 2 threads (old processors like Pentium): 5 times faster!

- 4 threads (Intel i3, Intel i5): 10 times faster!

- 8 threads (Intel i7): 20 times faster!

- 16 threads (high-end): 40 times faster!



Note that:

- lichess will detect your computer performance and allow local evaluation up to 25 plies, against 18 before.

- by default, lichess only uses half your computer processors, as to not stress it too much during analysis. But you will be allowed to configure it soon, and double the performances again by using all your processors!

- only Chrome, Chromium, and Opera browsers support this optimization. Firefox and other browsers performances are unchanged.



As far as we know, this is a lichess exclusivity. Enjoy!

szeweningen2 #5 Quick question, is it possible we could have an option to see top 1-3 lines during engine eval? I know arrows are giving the top move anyway, but seeing a regular line makes analysis so much easier.

thibault #6 We're working on multipv - i.e. see the best 3 moves, not only the best one.



Displaying lines is another matter. Engines output UCI moves (g1f3) but players want SAN notation (Nf3). Converting from UCI to SAN is way harder than it may seem, and requires complete knowledge of the rules of chess. Because performances and chess variants, only the server knows how to do that.

Also lines are text-heavy and tend to clutter the UI.

Finally, they are of no help to the majority of players who, like myself, are incapable of visualizing the boards while reading a line.

For all these reasons, I prefer showing an arrow only.

blackzombie #7 Great! It was a bit slow before.

LikesTal #8 Perhaps at least in "Study" mode show full lines instead of arrows? I mean, this is what it is for, to study chess games.

brokenwifi #9 This is great. Given the plugable nature of lichess' Stockfish (native mobile, js, now nacl) have you considered to use ethereum.org to create a full desktop app with lichess?



The advantage would be many. You could distribute lichess on OS X and windows app stores. The main advantage would be that you could use the c library for stockfish directly or even support all UCI engines on the machine.