Hi All!
Was very curious what actually occurs when loading a game up to play! I also was curious if the process is the same for a singleplayer game versus a multiplayer game?
Thanks!
In: 15
Computers operate out of memory, you have register memory, cache memory, and main memory. Then you have static (assuming you are not using persistent RAM) memory sources, so hard disks, tape drives, whatever.
The latter two are far to slow to be processed by the CPU efficiently, so most of a computer ‘loading’ is the system reading files associated with the program and loading them into memory. When you are interacting with the program it is happening in memory primarily. There are times when things are pressed to the disk, either through something called ‘virtual memory’ (where the contents of memory are placed on a special part of the disk) or to temporary files.
Even your operating system works mostly out of memory, when you boot up the computer besides all of the input/output stuff that has to load it loads your interface (CLI, GUI, web, whatever) and that is primarily run out of main memory. Some programs like databases have defined instances of when things are put to disk. Say you update a table in a database, and you do this all day every day if you are on the internet. Somewhere a database is collecting information off a website you are visiting. The first place it is written to is memory, then to a log file, then to the actual database file.
Back in *the day* when memory wasn’t as ubiquitous, you would retrieve information primarily off of tape. This was back in the days of storagetek robots. Because memory was hard to come by, basically every query was answered by a robot loading a tape and finding the information you were looking for. You would write a query and go grab some coffee. If you were lucky, someone else did that query very recently so when you went to grab it the information was still in cache memory and you didn’t have to wait minutes.
TLDR; regardless of what program you are running, if the program says ‘loading’ it is reading from the disk and putting it into memory.
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