[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Discrepancy between Lichess and Stockfish
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       Ask HN: Discrepancy between Lichess and Stockfish
        
       I'm trying to understand a discrepancy between Lichess's analysis
       board and my own Stockfish setup.  On Lichess (browser-based
       analysis), Stockfish reports close to 1 MN/s on my Redmi Note 14
       Pro. However, when I run Stockfish locally via a Python program
       using the native executable, I only see around 600 kN/s.  What's
       confusing is that despite the higher reported speed, Lichess takes
       about 2:30 to reach depth 30, while my local setup reaches depth 30
       in about 53 seconds, even though it reports a lower N/s. Lichess
       also appears much more "active" in terms of frequent evaluation
       updates.  I suspect this has to do with how N/s is measured or
       displayed (instantaneous vs average), differences in search
       configuration (continuous search vs restarts, MultiPV, hash reuse),
       or overhead from the way the engine is driven (e.g., UI or I/O
       throttling). It also raises the question of whether "depth 30" is
       directly comparable across different frontends.  Has anyone looked
       into how Lichess reports Stockfish speed, or why a setup showing
       higher N/s can still take significantly longer to reach the same
       nominal depth?
        
       Author : HNLurker2
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2026-01-13 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
       | frenchtoast8 wrote:
       | Most of Lichess is open source, have you tried looking there to
       | see how Lichess interacts with Stockfish?
       | https://github.com/lichess-org
        
       | eterm wrote:
       | The lichess one might be in "multi-line" mode
        
       | agalunar wrote:
       | You may want to ask in the Stockfish discord:
       | https://discord.com/invite/GWDRS3kU6R
        
       | y-curious wrote:
       | Confirm in the network tab that you are going 100% local on
       | lichess. My shot in the dark (I don't contribute to their
       | codebase) is that you're offloading some analysis to Fishnet[1]
       | 
       | I would rule that out first
       | 
       | 1: https://lichess.org/get-fishnet
        
         | y-curious wrote:
         | One other thing I dug up that may help:
         | 
         | https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/groundbreaking-im...
        
       | anematode wrote:
       | Hi, I work on Stockfish! Likely what's going on is that your
       | Lichess instance is running in MultiPV mode, which displays the
       | top N moves (5 by default, iirc). This can be useful for
       | analysis, but it leads to more time exploring disfavored lines,
       | and therefore lower depth. The desktop version defaults to
       | MultiPV = 1.
        
         | Viren6 wrote:
         | I also work on Stockfish, that is not the reason. The reason is
         | because the SF17.1 is functionally different, there is no way
         | to get these to match without changing the net option to be the
         | same as the stockfish binary.
         | 
         | See
         | https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/69515c60572093c1...
         | and https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/pull/18671
        
       | Viren6 wrote:
       | Lichess uses a smaller net by default. Default lichess net is
       | custom made by stockfish to be small
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-13 23:01 UTC)