Fetching 7.8 from Git and running on an SSD

[Philip Meyer]

I'm building a new PC and want to run SBS or LMS from my SSD, but don't want lots of frequently changing cache files on the SSD (conscious of disk space and reduce wear to increase lifetime of the disk).

With Git, it pulls the whole repository including all historic changes and branch info down locally. My .git folder is 586MB! Unless I'm mistaken, there's no way to fetch from a remote repository - I have to pull down the whole repository locally? If so, I guess I could initialise an empty git repository on a HDD, and then set a junction point to it from the SSD folder, and then fetch into this repository?

What about the SBS/LMS cache folder? My current LMS cache is 271MB. Are there parts of this that would be best suited to keep on SSD, whilst relocating other parts back on HDD? e.g. there is an Artwork folder that might have a lot of small files, but also an artwork.db? Is the artwork cache folder frequently changing?

Lastly, in my LMS cache root folder, I seem to have a proliferation of file*.db and plug*.db files. I think something has gone wrong - why are these getting created? Does LMS create these as temporary DBs, and I should expect them to be deleted when closing LMS? Is it safe to wipe them?

Phil

[erland]

What about the SBS/LMS cache folder? My current LMS cache is 271MB. Are there parts of this that would be best suited to keep on SSD, whilst relocating other parts back on HDD? e.g. there is an Artwork folder that might have a lot of small files, but also an artwork.db? Is the artwork cache folder frequently changing?

I thought the Artwork folder had been completely replaced with the artwork.db file, maybe you just have an old Artwork folder which haven't been deleted automatically when upgrading ?
(I think the upgrade process was supposed to delete it when they switched to artwork.db because the amount of files cased some issue on Windows if I remember correctly)

I think the FileCache has been replaced with cache.db also, so if you have a FileCache folder you can probably remove that also if you are using a recent LMS release.

If you want to avoid frequent writing, you probably want to at least put cache.db on the HDD and possibly the complete cache folder. However, I would also expect the biggest speed benefit of the SSD to be that the cache files are on the SSD because you want reads from the cache to be fast. Since I don't have any personal experience with SSD, I would just recommend you to try with having the Cache folder on the SSD and having it on the HDD and compare the performance, if you can't see any performance difference just put it on the HDD. From a performance perspective, I would expect that having the database files (library.db and persist.db) on the SSD would give a performance boost, by default these are stored in the cache folder but you can manually edit the dbsource preference and specify it with a path, like: "dbi:SQLite:dbname=/var/lib/squeezecenter/Cache77Small/library.db"

Lastly, in my LMS cache root folder, I seem to have a proliferation of file*.db and plug*.db files. I think something has gone wrong - why are these getting created? Does LMS create these as temporary DBs, and I should expect them to be deleted when closing LMS? Is it safe to wipe them?

I think all plug*.db probably is from my plugins, in that case it's safe to delete them, the only consequence is that the startup will take a bit longer next time as the cache needs to be re-created. The plugins are caching the parsed configuration data in these files as parsing can take a bit of time on slow hardware so I don't want to repeat it every time the server is restarted.

If I remember correctly the filenames of the *.db files are shorten to 8 characters on Windows, due to some limitation in some perl library, which result in that the names aren't as descriptive as I would like, on a Linux machine you would get the full names, the full names have the syntax:
PluginCache-*.db (where the * is replaced with the full plugin name, for example "CustomBrowse").

[Philip Meyer]

>I thought the Artwork folder had been completely replaced with the
>artwork.db file, maybe you just have an old Artwork folder which haven't
>been deleted automatically when upgrading ?
>
Oh, could be right. I thought I cleared the content of the cache folder down aftern I cloned a copy, but that might have been before switching to 7.8 and SQLite.

>I think the FileCache has been replaced with cache.db also, so if you
>have a FileCache folder you can probably remove that also if you are
>using a recent LMS release.
>
I just tried removing everything except library.db and persist.db and InstalledPlugins from the cache folder, to see what gets recreated.

Unfortunately, I've been unable to get 7.8 to run - the latest ActivePerl is 5.14.2, LMS seems to need 5.14.1. It complained that EV and JSON::XS needed upgrading for 5.14.2, which I fetched with ppm install. Now complaining Auido::Scan and Audio::Scale are not compatible.

I can't find the installer for ActivePerl 5.14.1 64 bit; the ActivePerl site only keeps the latest official site.

Phil

[erland]

Unfortunately, I've been unable to get 7.8 to run - the latest ActivePerl is 5.14.2, LMS seems to need 5.14.1. It complained that EV and JSON::XS needed upgrading for 5.14.2, which I fetched with ppm install. Now complaining Auido::Scan and Audio::Scale are not compatible.

I can't find the installer for ActivePerl 5.14.1 64 bit; the ActivePerl site only keeps the latest official site.

There is a bug report for perl versions which you might want to monitor:
http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17985
(I mentioned your previous post in the bug report to indicate that the "bug" also affect Windows users now)

[mherger]

> http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17985

Phil - could you please post specific error messages you get to this bug?

Not a solution to the problem, but probably some help to work around the
issue:

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/releases/

--

Michael

[JJZolx]

Is the 7.8 SVN repository still current?

[JJZolx]

What about the SBS/LMS cache folder? My current LMS cache is 271MB. Are there parts of this that would be best suited to keep on SSD, whilst relocating other parts back on HDD? e.g. there is an Artwork folder that might have a lot of small files, but also an artwork.db? Is the artwork cache folder frequently changing?

Like erland said, the artwork cache folder is no longer used. I think the installer may have been responsible for deleting it, so if you're running from SVN, it won't have been deleted.

I run a batch file each night to compact the SQLite databases using the SQLite command-line shell. It helps to keep the database sizes in check. The databases can get particularly large if you run full clear & rescans, because when the databases are cleared, the space isn't reclaimed. New & changed scans also cause the databases to grow, but not as severely.

sqlite "D:\slim\cache\artwork.db" "VACUUM;"
sqlite "D:\slim\cache\cache.db" "VACUUM;"
sqlite "D:\slim\cache\library.db" "VACUUM;"
sqlite "D:\slim\cache\persist.db" "VACUUM;"

[erland]

Is the 7.8 SVN repository still current?

Depends on what you mean with current, 7.8 in svn doesn't contain any changes since May 8'th.
After May 8'th a few changes have been made in the 7.8 version and these are only available in the git repository.
So I guess that means it's almost current :-)

For 7.7 it's a bit in-between as it seems like some changes are committed to both svn and git and some are only committed to svn and some only to git, but it's not that easy to decipher the commit logs, they might be exactly the same also and just that the commits have different dates and different committers. Either way, we are just talking of a few changes since they switched to git so there aren't any major differences at the moment.

[gharris999]

With Git, it pulls the whole repository including all historic changes and branch info down locally. My .git folder is 586MB! Unless I'm mistaken, there's no way to fetch from a remote repository - I have to pull down the whole repository locally?Phil

If you:

git clone -n --depth 1 https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver.git destrepo

..that gets just the latest commits, not the whole history. It will cut the size of the local repo in half.

[gharris999]

Unfortunately, I've been unable to get 7.8 to run - the latest ActivePerl is 5.14.2, LMS seems to need 5.14.1. It complained that EV and JSON::XS needed upgrading for 5.14.2, which I fetched with ppm install. Now complaining Auido::Scan and Audio::Scale are not compatible.

I can't find the installer for ActivePerl 5.14.1 64 bit; the ActivePerl site only keeps the latest official site.

Phil

I've have no problems at all running the svn and then the git code with perl 5.14.2 64bit on Ubuntu Server 12.04 since April.

perl -v

This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
(with 53 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)