Does having more variables lag the game?

[MasterWarlord]

I have heard from the grape vine that you want to have as few variables as possible, and that simply having a lot of variables will slow down the game. Does this happen by any noticeable amount? Does it have any validity to it?

 

[noob2]

A variable takes space in the ram.
If you have tons of variables that are all arrays of the maximum size it can start taking significant amounts of ram but if you are using only a dozen of arrays of the maximum size it is not going to give any problems.(as far as I know)
You can probably use tons and tons of variables that are not arrays.

 

[Dr Super Good]

A variable takes space in the ram.
If you have tons of variables that are all arrays of the maximum size it can start taking significant amounts of ram but if you are using only a dozen of arrays of the maximum size it is not going to give any problems.(as far as I know)
You can probably use tons and tons of variables that are not arrays.

RAM usage does not degrade performance as long as your system is not memory bound. With Warcraft III using up to 4GB of memory and modern computers having anywhere from 8GB to 16GB that is not a problem. The game will crash long before memory usage starts to degrade performance due to page thrashing.

I have heard from the grape vine that you want to have as few variables as possible, and that simply having a lot of variables will slow down the game. Does this happen by any noticeable amount? Does it have any validity to it?

Due to the way the hashtables work that are used for runtime lookup of variables by the JASS virtual machine, having a lot of variables will decrease the average lookup performance. This is because the hashtable used has a finite bucket count and so more variables will result in more collisions which will add a O(n) like performance factor to variable lookup.

Is it noticeable? For hundreds of thousands of variables quite possibly as the overhead might become significant enough that some systems relying on a lot of variable lookup or assignment might start to perform poorly. That said within the average map use case such number of variables are unlikely. In worst case if it is a problem caused by non-array variables one could write a tool to automatically translate several thousands of such variables into a single array by assigning them each a unique static index.

 

[noob2]

With 256 mo of ram warcraft 3 runs.
(it however have some slight graphism problems on this set up but it can load melee maps and play them)

 

[Dr Super Good]

With 256 mo of ram warcraft 3 runs.

Warcraft III uses over 2GB of virtual memory space for some custom maps. It is unclear how much of that is memory mapped files.