Can I get some feedback about Squeezebox lag time?

[oldsmobuick]

Hi, I'm a new squeezebox owner and i'm very happy with the unit so far-- most of the time. the main (only?) problem for me is the excruciating lag time when browsing!

i have a large music collection (300GB+ of MP3s @192 kbps) on an external firewire drive. i am using a G5 iMac, 2GHz with a wireless squeezebox 2. the squeezebox is about 20 feet away from the iMac and another 20 feet away from the wireless router (squeezebox has between 50-60% signal). i am using the current public beta, version 6.1b1

i use the iTunes folder as my music directory; it has roughly 5,000 albums in it.


if i want to browse to, for example:

browse music/browse genre/reggae/various artists/100% dynamite/Night and Day - Toots & the Maytals

i get as far as:

browse music/browse genre/reggae/various artists

then hit the right arrow to view the list of various artists albums, it hangs for up to a minute. and i only have 16 various artists albums in "reggae."

as a side note, the lag time is the same if i execute the same functions from the slim server web interface.

this is just an example, this type of lag happens a lot under different circumstances. can anyone tell me if this is typical? i get the sense that there are lag issues that Slim is dealing with still but this seems unbearable sometimes.

thanks in advance for any help!!

[Maditude]

oldsmobuick wrote:
> then hit the right arrow to view the list of various artists
> albums, it hangs for up to a minute. and i only have 16 various
> artists albums in "reggae."

I'm presuming you've let your slimserver finish building it's database...

I know some work was done to make large playlists not bog down slimserver quite so badly, and you say you're using the latest public beta, but does the laggy behavior only occur when you've got a lot of songs queued up to be played?

If it's laggy even when you've got an empty play-list, then I'd suggest running some diag/performance tests on your Mac.

[oldsmobuick]

The lag ocurs even if there is nothing queued to be played and yes, the server has finished scanning the music folder and building the database (made sure of that). i can freshly start up both the device and the server and do the above sequence (see previous post) or a similar one and have the same sort of lag time.

thanks for your reply, i'll hang in and hope for some speedier builds down the road...

-nick

[dropbear]

the other option is to reorganise your directory structure. I had all 900 albums in one directory and the Browse Folder was slooooooow. By setting up an Alphabetical directory structure and moving the albums into it, I found response times dramatically improved. The biggest number of sub-directories I now have is about 25 under S. It still takes upto 10 seconds to read, but much better than before, and I'm still running a 6.1 nightly from May.

Mind you doing this sort of reorganisation leads to questions like Various Artists - is that a directory under V or do I set up Genre sub-directories? No simple answer here, just one you have to answer yourself

Pete