Making Totten Start Up Faster

This helped load the program up much quicker. Why the moves are still loading In the previous message, two options were discussed: Header-only indexing (chess.pgn.read_headers), which skips moves entirely. Byte-seeking with full games (f.seek() combined with read_game), which reads the full game data (including moves). The code provided used Option 2. It still used read_game(), meaning every single move, node, and variation for that chunk of 100 games was fully parsed and loaded into memory. Why it became so fast The reason it sped up gigantically without losing the moves comes down to what was being skipped: Before: Your code was reading from the very beginning of the file every time and parsing every single game just to skip past them and reach your current offset. If your catalog had 5,000 games, it had to parse 4,900 games just to get to your current batch. Now: f.seek(byte_offset) jumps straight to the exact byte location of your current chunk instantly in 0.001 seconds. It only runs read_game() on the 100 games you are actually looking at right now, completely bypassing the rest of the file. You get the best of both worlds: instant startup speed and fully loaded moves ready for analysis. Here is how it works under the hood: The Bookmark (f.tell()): When Python finished reading your 100th game during your last session, the file reader was sitting at a very specific character/byte position in the text file. The code asked f.tell() for that exact number and saved it to catalog_offset.txt. The Jump (f.seek()): When you restart the program, instead of starting at byte 0 (the very top of the file) and reading through everything, f.seek(byte_offset) tells Python: "Jump straight to this exact byte position." Flawless Alignment: Because f.tell() always records the position right at the end of a successfully parsed game, jumping back to it lands Python right at the exact start of game number 101. It doesn't guess or look for a nearby game; it goes straight to the exact line where it left off.