Optimizing to use more memory?

[Mnyb]

Similar to my setup, OS on 500Gb 2 1/2" WD Scorpio Black, music on 2TB green drives.

I have been running LMS all day with the internal database size increased (library.db cache size to the same as page count) and have confirmed initial testing that the first browse of New Music still stops everything for a minute, then after playing some tracks for a while subsequent browses of Albums, Artists and New Music happen really quickly. After adding two CDs to my library, scan for new and changed, then a browse for New Music was also very quick where before it would have stopped everything for a minute or so. Task Manager shows SQUEEZE~3.EXE using 450,000K of memory.

the "first browse of New Music" is this per session per boot of the server, after a scan operaration .

is this in every UI or just the web-UI

[Wirrunna]

the "first browse of New Music" is this per session per boot of the server, after a scan operaration .

is this in every UI or just the web-UI

Per boot of the server or restart of LMS.

[Mnyb]

Per boot of the server or restart of LMS.

Was there ever a bug for this ? This is exactly something that LMS would load in to memory when booted .

Size of new music would it matter i have 400 albums ,when I get home from work I'll try the unlimited approach and make it have all my albums

[Wirrunna]

Was there ever a bug for this ? This is exactly something that LMS would load in to memory when booted .

Size of new music would it matter i have 400 albums ,when I get home from work I'll try the unlimited approach and make it have all my albums

Don't know if there was ever a bug logged for this, but there have been a few threads on the browse New Music causing delays - http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...trigger-a-scan, and more recently http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...-quot-function.

I don't know whether making LMS load the database to memory when booted would always be a good idea, especially for low powered servers - it could cause a delay in LMS starting to replay music. I don't normally browse new music first thing after starting the server.

I will be interested to read your findings.

[Mnyb]

Don't know if there was ever a bug logged for this, but there have been a few threads on the browse New Music causing delays - http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...trigger-a-scan, and more recently http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...-quot-function.

I don't know whether making LMS load the database to memory when booted would always be a good idea, especially for low powered servers - it could cause a delay in LMS starting to replay music. I don't normally browse new music first thing after starting the server.

I will be interested to read your findings.

There is and I already voted :P

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17914

But lately i have not seen a single community reported bug getting fixed or getting any attention what so ever ?

[Jeff Flowerday]

I run 2 LMS servers both with 110,000 tracks.

First is a 6 core i7 with 12GB of ram and an SSD for the OS drive. Windows 7 SP1. LMS on this machine has all my mp3s with embedded art large side capped at 600px. MP3s are stored on a dedicated single 1.5TB 7200 RPM Seagate drive.

Second machine is a 4 core i7 with 8GB of ram. 2 Western Digital 7200 RPM black drives in a Raid 1 for the OS drive. Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. LMS on this machine has all my FLACs with album art stored as folder.jpg in album folders with the actual flac files. Some of the art can be up to 1500px on the long edge. Music files are stored on external storage connected via eSata, the external storage drive has 2 green 2TB drives in a Raid 0 configuration for speed.

The Mp3 library machine with the ssd OS drive has always been fast and never had an issue with New Music or a hiccup.

The Flac library machine with Raid 1 OS drive always had issues with New Music and 1 minute hang ups. I tried dozens of different configs and suggestions and only putting a Ram Drive in place on this machine and moving the database and cached art onto it solved the problem.


.02

[gharris999]

I agree that the delays are caused by disk access of the database file.

The delay shows itself most when browsing New Music. I upgraded one of my desktops to Win7 and an SSD, it has the same mobo, cpu and ram as the other desktop, same version of LMS and library (just in different houses 250 miles apart). Browsing New Music on the SSD is very fast with no apparent delay.

"Production" LMS servers in both houses are lower spec XP with 4Gb RAM and green drives. Browse New Music causes a delay of over 1 minute with play stopping and the Touch losing connection with the server. Once the New Music display is done and connection re-established play will proceed, if after playing only a few tracks selecting New Music can stop everything again.

In the few hours of testing with the internal database size increased (library.db cache size to the same as page count) I have found that the first browse of New Music still stops everything for a minute, then after playing some tracks for a while subsequent browses of Albums, Artists and New Music happen really quickly. Task Manager shows that SQUEEZE~3.EXE has grown from 150,000K to 350,000K.

I think that after the initial load of data that subsequent queries are from RAM, so I don't think increasing the internal database cache size compounds the problem.

I was experiencing this last year and adding the .autoexec feature to SrvrPowerCtrl was my attempted fix. See: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...-initial-query

[Mnyb]

Some random experiments .

Having the max sisze of new music so it encompassed the whole collection did not make it slow for me .

But increasing the items per page setting to max 500 instead of 50 as I had before made it load slower .

Disclaimer :
collections is probably not large enough to provoke any slowness

Total Tracks: 36,589
Total Albums: 3,038
Total Artists: 1,288
Total Genres: 219
Total Playing Time: 2767:44:37

On my HP N36L microserver 1GB of ram ClearOS and LMS rpm package .

[sander]

Has anyone done any more experimentation on memory/performance optimization on LMS? I've been playing with expanding the cache variable expanding the default on high from 2000 to 200000 (2GB?) and the main squeezeboxerver process (linux) seems to use more memory and searches don't hang, but the web ui still chugs sometimes and still is slow to draw the combo controls.

I was concerned when I saw oddball behavior where selecting a song caused it to appear under a new identical album in on each selection, but I rebuilt the db and that problem hasn't returned yet. That one song appears twice in the db for some reason even after rebuild so maybe there is something else at work.

I was toying with the idea of mounting /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache as tmpfs and seeing if that helped. I would take a hit when the machine rebooted, but it should be helpful. My 2 concerns with this would be the perl process when scanning seems to take up all available memory so maybe it would swap it all out and negate any benefit. Also in my old setup (7.3.4 on a readynas) the cache would grow over the course of year to multiple GB of artwork for some reason. I don't know if LMS is more efficient, but if it maxed out the ram disk and crashed that would be a drag.

I can live with some of the performance issues, but the problems I've seen with unresponsive button pushes on my boom and occasional spikes where all machines lose connectivity are work concern me most.

[JJZolx]

The newer artwork caching (from 7.5 or 7.6, IIRC) uses a SQLite database, and is a lot more efficient, but I don't think there's any garbage collection and it will keep growing if you don't maintain it. As mentioned above, you can keep the databases from growing out of control by running a VACUUM operation on them every once in a while. It probably also helps a bit with database speed. I shut down the server and run the following in a Windows batch files once a day to keep things in check. The commands that delete files get rid of cruft that LMS and the scanner sometimes leave behind.

if exist "D:\slim\cache\__db.*" (
  del "D:\slim\cache\__db.*"
)
if exist "D:\slim\cache\libmediascan.db" (
  del "D:\slim\cache\libmediascan.db"
)
if exist "D:\slim\cache\artwork.db" (
  sqlite "D:\slim\cache\artwork.db" "VACUUM;"
)
if exist "D:\slim\cache\cache.db" (
  sqlite "D:\slim\cache\cache.db" "VACUUM;"
)
if exist "D:\slim\cache\library.db" (
  sqlite "D:\slim\cache\library.db" "VACUUM;"
)
if exist "D:\slim\cache\persist.db" (
  sqlite "D:\slim\cache\persist.db" "VACUUM;"
)

http://www.sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html