Official forums for BZFlag.org

ooooooooooooooooo

How effective is it?
If it's about 5-10ms better, I wouldn't be too keen on it.

I don't see how "temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance." will reduce network lag. Unless the background processes are running internet services... For example a download - which any sane person would turn off when playing BZFlag anyway.

I think any improvement you may be experiencing might be one big fat placebo effect.

Well, I can see how this could help with jitter at least. When people leave a browser running in the background, for instance, it can cause their jitter to be much higher than normal because the CPU time is being split between the game and the browser, which makes the client get fewer resources to process network data and render graphics.

A CPU is almost always shared between several programs/threads and any CPU can only run a limited number of threads in hardware the solution used is timeslicing between threads. This means CPU time is practically always split between threads.

It only counts how much resources the other opened programs use. A good browser for instance only uses CPU cycles when needed and as consequence plain XTHML/HTML/CSS shown should be irrelevant (in case there are no refreshes or animations). Same with other opened applications.

I think the description sounds like a trojan horse.

Hm,

I noticed that on my "old lady" bzflag runs better if I close all unnecessary aps and services. But the reason for that is only my insufficient RAM. So for me, every Kibit counts.

You can use procX or Task Killer for that (windows, freeware).

That only means your OS and/or your applications are bad, AFAIK. Inactive applications hardly need RAM. Most of the memory of inactive applications can be safely moved from RAM to other storage devices like a hard disk. I write most because some data of applications should not be moved (like passwords) and of course the OS needs some stuff (both instruction memory and data memory; see Harvard architecture) to be in RAM.

One bad example I found was this one: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3602. I wouldn't be surprised if it is all Adobe's fault.

Having less things loaded will help the windows memory manager not page them out, this will free up a slight amount of CPU. Also the windows messaging system does send idle events to applications even if they are not doing anything so taking those out of the loop also helps.

Basically having less things running means less things for the OS to keep track of.

TS. you must remember that windows does not work like linux or the mac.

I have not seen any reports that gamebooster contains any mallware, but as always be careful what you install.

This may help lower end systems preform slightly better.