Installing Slim Server on XPembedded

[fredbloggs]

Hi guys and girls,

I've got an opportunity to get an old thin terminal running XPe, this runs on solid state drives and Via 550MHz CPU(Via Samuel 2 chipset http://www.cpushack.net/VIA.html). The machine will have about 480MB RAM available to run and will be a dedicated SlimServer.

I plan on hosting my music on an external USB drive and have only 20MB available on the inbuilt C: drive and have the opportunity to install SlimServer on a 240MB D: drive (Solid state).

The questions I have are
if I install SS on the D: drive will I still require any space on the C: drive to run SS?

How much space is generally used by you guys to host the MySQL database (I'm nowhere near finishing with my ripping) for I guess about 10,000 songs, 1000 albums, 300 artists?

Can I host the SQL database on the external USB drive if space issues are a concern?

When is data updated for the SlimServer install? Is this just during a rescan/plugin addition or will data need to be retained between reboots?

Am I likely to be struggling with performance or would this only be noticed during scans and through the Web Interface

Sorry if these have been asked before but I can't find the information.

Thanks guys, this could allow me to have a nearly always on server system.

Mark

[matthijskoopmans]

My SlimServer install takes around 170 MB (1500 albums) The majority of that space seems to be taken up by the MySQL folder in the Cache folder. Specifically the file ibdata1, which I suspect is the database (sorry, haven't looked into MySQL at all... )

So, I would say that you could run it from that location... but only just.

Would it hurt to try?

Cheers

Matt

[AndyC_772]

OK, dumb question time.

If the majority of that space is the database, then in round numbers, that's 100k bytes per album.

If each album has, say, 15 tracks, each of which is tagged by name and artist, that's still less than 1kB of actual data.

What on earth is going on that makes it need _100 TIMES_ that much space?

[funkstar]

Here is a list of the tags SS supports:
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SlimServerSupportedTags

So it is storing all that for each track, along with album art for each album too.

I'm guessing there are also tables that are duplicating data in there as well. If you are being purely academic about it, all your data would be unique and you would just refer to it through queries etc. However in the real world there can be massive performance hits for doing this, so extra tables are created during the scan for some of the more common lookups.

There will also be MySQL internal filesystem overhead. It's not just raw data it is storing. Just like an empty word document is about 25KB, because ther are a lot of non-obvious things it is saving in there as well.

[AndyC_772]

Well, yes, but... 100 TIMES bigger?!

Maybe if you've got album covers scanned I suppose...