Best Performance - recommendations?

[thomas]

Hello,

I have two original Slimp3s and one of the second generation wired players. All three run from one Slimp3 server. The server has about 60GB of music. Often, there is more than one person viewing the web interface. The players are only ever controlled from the web interface, nobody has access to the hardware players or remotes.

The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for example two people run searches on the music library, all three players will stall.

I know the server is designed with single users in mind, but there must be a way of increasing performance. Originally I ran the server on a Windows box, but have found performance slightly better when running on Mac OS X. The Mac box I have is only a dual-1Ghz G4.

What hardware and OS is recommended for best performance? I don't mind spending some money on getting it right, but am reluctant to unless I have a pretty good idea of what sort of improvement I can expect and what hardware and OS is likely to perform best.

Thx

Thomas

[radish]

Well dual CPUs aren't going to help as slimserver is single threaded, so your mac is effectively a single 1GHz G4. I would imagine you want the fastest single proc you can get, but I don't have any specific recommendations.

[Jim]

Best Performance - recommendations?

thomas wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have two original Slimp3s and one of the second generation wired
> players. All three run from one Slimp3 server. The server has about
> 60GB of music. Often, there is more than one person viewing the web
> interface. The players are only ever controlled from the web interface,
> nobody has access to the hardware players or remotes.
>
> The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's
> getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for
> example two people run searches on the music library, all three players
> will stall.
>
> I know the server is designed with single users in mind, but there must
> be a way of increasing performance. Originally I ran the server on a
> Windows box, but have found performance slightly better when running on
> Mac OS X. The Mac box I have is only a dual-1Ghz G4.
>
> What hardware and OS is recommended for best performance? I don't mind
> spending some money on getting it right, but am reluctant to unless I
> have a pretty good idea of what sort of improvement I can expect and
> what hardware and OS is likely to perform best.

Unless you're transcoding on-the-fly, I'd look first at the hard drive
speed and RAM. I suspect since you're using a somewhat older Mac (early
2002, yes?), that the drive isn't all it can be. The stock 512MB of RAM
that came with the dual processor units should be enough, though PC133
isn't screaming fast.

Western Digital, and others, have IDE drives with integrated 8MB caches.
They're affordable and perform very well compared to a 2MB cache version.

Personally, I use Linux (Fedora Core 1) to host SlimServer and three
players. My library is pretty "medium" in size, 3,000 songs at ~11GB.
2.4GHz Celeron with 512MB RAM and one of the WD 8MB drives, cost me
about $300.

Jim

[Mitch Harding]

Best Performance - recommendations?

If disk IO is the limiting factor, I'd consider a RAID array. With
drive prices, RAID 5 is affordable and gives you both improved disk
access times plus data security.

On 7/29/05, Jim <jim1128 (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote:
> thomas wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have two original Slimp3s and one of the second generation wired
> > players. All three run from one Slimp3 server. The server has about
> > 60GB of music. Often, there is more than one person viewing the web
> > interface. The players are only ever controlled from the web interface,
> > nobody has access to the hardware players or remotes.
> >
> > The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's
> > getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for
> > example two people run searches on the music library, all three players
> > will stall.
> >
> > I know the server is designed with single users in mind, but there must
> > be a way of increasing performance. Originally I ran the server on a
> > Windows box, but have found performance slightly better when running on
> > Mac OS X. The Mac box I have is only a dual-1Ghz G4.
> >
> > What hardware and OS is recommended for best performance? I don't mind
> > spending some money on getting it right, but am reluctant to unless I
> > have a pretty good idea of what sort of improvement I can expect and
> > what hardware and OS is likely to perform best.
>
> Unless you're transcoding on-the-fly, I'd look first at the hard drive
> speed and RAM. I suspect since you're using a somewhat older Mac (early
> 2002, yes?), that the drive isn't all it can be. The stock 512MB of RAM
> that came with the dual processor units should be enough, though PC133
> isn't screaming fast.
>
> Western Digital, and others, have IDE drives with integrated 8MB caches.
> They're affordable and perform very well compared to a 2MB cache version.
>
> Personally, I use Linux (Fedora Core 1) to host SlimServer and three
> players. My library is pretty "medium" in size, 3,000 songs at ~11GB.
> 2.4GHz Celeron with 512MB RAM and one of the WD 8MB drives, cost me
> about $300.
>
> Jim
>
>

[Stewart Loving-Gibbard]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tellyou what *isn't* working for me..

>>>The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's
>>>getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for
>>>example two people run searches on the music library, all three players
>>>will stall.

Ah, a topic near to my heart.

I'm running a dual P3 800 mhz Linux box. 512 MB RAM. 750 GB RAID 5 array
(4 x 250 GB drives, PATA), 3Ware 4-port RAID controller. I have about
300 GB of MP3s in the SlimServer library. 2 Slimp3s, 1 Squeezebox 1,
although it's the Slimp3s getting active duty.

The server does some very light email chores and file serving, but its
primary task is to run Slimserver. Which it struggles with. Which still
surprises the heck out of me.

Doing a search or active use of the web interface will often interrupt
music playing. The web interface can take 10-20 seconds to respond or
get to the next tab, although it's usually 2-5 seconds.

Until browsing was fixed in the 6.1.x releases, it could take 50 seconds
to get from one directory to enclosed directories using the remote and
display. Sometimes, the player display would actually blank out. Now,
it's better, but each button press still takes .5 - 5 seconds to
respond, usually .5-1.5 seconds. It's still aggravating, regardless.

I can't shake the feeling that if the server were multi-threaded that
these problems would be completely absent. One thread to make sure the
players didn't go dry, one to handle navigation via the remote, one to
handle the web server, etc. Part of me keeps hoping SlimDevices has a
master plan to fix all this. Python, Java? A tidy C++ core maybe? I'm
not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I'm going to throw an absurd amount of hardware at this
problem. I'm putting together a dual Xeon 3ghz server, likely with a
Areca SATA RAID 5. (The performance of the 3ware RAID cards has always
been underwhelming, Perl proc hogs aside. The Areca/Tekrams I have
running elsewhere seem far, far better.)

I'd be curious if anyone out there with a "large" library (I'll let you
define what that means) is getting good or even snappy performance with
their setup? Care to brag?

Stew

Mitch Harding wrote:
> If disk IO is the limiting factor, I'd consider a RAID array. With
> drive prices, RAID 5 is affordable and gives you both improved disk
> access times plus data security.
>
> On 7/29/05, Jim <jim1128 (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote:
>
>>thomas wrote:
>>
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>I have two original Slimp3s and one of the second generation wired
>>>players. All three run from one Slimp3 server. The server has about
>>>60GB of music. Often, there is more than one person viewing the web
>>>interface. The players are only ever controlled from the web interface,
>>>nobody has access to the hardware players or remotes.
>>>
>>>The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's
>>>getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for
>>>example two people run searches on the music library, all three players
>>>will stall.
>>>
>>>I know the server is designed with single users in mind, but there must
>>>be a way of increasing performance. Originally I ran the server on a
>>>Windows box, but have found performance slightly better when running on
>>>Mac OS X. The Mac box I have is only a dual-1Ghz G4.
>>>
>>>What hardware and OS is recommended for best performance? I don't mind
>>>spending some money on getting it right, but am reluctant to unless I
>>>have a pretty good idea of what sort of improvement I can expect and
>>>what hardware and OS is likely to perform best.
>>
>>Unless you're transcoding on-the-fly, I'd look first at the hard drive
>>speed and RAM. I suspect since you're using a somewhat older Mac (early
>>2002, yes?), that the drive isn't all it can be. The stock 512MB of RAM
>>that came with the dual processor units should be enough, though PC133
>>isn't screaming fast.
>>
>>Western Digital, and others, have IDE drives with integrated 8MB caches.
>>They're affordable and perform very well compared to a 2MB cache version.
>>
>>Personally, I use Linux (Fedora Core 1) to host SlimServer and three
>>players. My library is pretty "medium" in size, 3,000 songs at ~11GB.
>>2.4GHz Celeron with 512MB RAM and one of the WD 8MB drives, cost me
>>about $300.
>>
>>Jim
>>
>>

[radish]

I don't know if I qualify as "large", but this is my current status:

Your music library contains 750 albums with 9298 songs by 3275 artists

That's mainly FLAC or Vorbis (a few mp3s) taking around 130GB total. Slimserver (6.1.1) is running on XP Pro/SP2, on a 1.3GHz athlon with 512mb and Seagate Barracuda disks (no RAID, PATA). The box is pretty much idle apart from SS. Performance when browsing is fine, the occasional UI pause of less than a second (for instance when going into Browse Artists) but I can live with that. Interruptions are rare (I'm not sure I've seen once since upgrading the server) but to be honest I don't really stretch it - we rarely use more than one player at a time.

[tgoldstone]

When I set up my system I took the 200% approach which was to make a system that was 200% more than I needed. I have a SB1 and an SB2 both wireless. I have never had a hiccup or a pause or anything that has effected slimserver performance. UI performance is excellent.
This setup is working great for me.
Intel mainboard 7505 chipset with dual 2.4ghz xeon with HT.
Mirrored 10K RPM Raptor system drives
4 250GB WD SATA drives raid 5 using Adaptec 4 port 64mhz PCI-X card.
1GB RAM DDR something.

Current library is 12,500 tracks and growing...

[CouchPotatoe]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tellyou what *isn't* working for me..

Stewart Loving-Gibbard wrote:

> >>>The larger the music library gets, the worse the performance. It's
> >>>getting to a stage where it really isn't good enough to run - when for
> >>>example two people run searches on the music library, all three
> players
> >>>will stall.
>
> Ah, a topic near to my heart.
>
>
> In the meantime, I'm going to throw an absurd amount of hardware at
> this problem. I'm putting together a dual Xeon 3ghz server, likely
> with a Areca SATA RAID 5. (The performance of the 3ware RAID cards has
> always been underwhelming, Perl proc hogs aside. The Areca/Tekrams I
> have running elsewhere seem far, far better.)
>
> I'd be curious if anyone out there with a "large" library (I'll let
> you define what that means) is getting good or even snappy performance
> with their setup? Care to brag?
>
Hi Stewart,

A topic near to my heart too. I would caution against throwing
"absurd amounts of hardware" at this as a solution. SlimServer runs for
me on XP on a 3.4GHz 4GB memory machine, almost dedicated and the
results , although slightly better than before, are still flawed. Memory
- which was a big issue on v5 is now not an issue under v6. Here's my
experience...

I have a very large library - circa 100K tracks, and I have 8 players
although only ever about 2 or 3 are playing. The V6 Slimserver has
helped solve a lot of my problems (stalls) but it hasn't fixed what I
believe is an architecture issue in SlimServer to do with threading. It
is not the number of players that is the issue btw. On searching my
library I can interrupt all playback and displays for over 15 minutes !!
This is to do with the search results being large, if you search for
narrower terms then control returns quicker, say 2-3 minutes but once
you exceed 10 secs or so then music stalls so it's still an issue. . If
I rescan my libray it takes over 24 hours :-( and all player
interaction is lost for that time. This has got much worse btw in recent
(beta) builds. There has been a bug filed over a year since v5.1.6 - it
was hoped to fix this in v6 with the new DB architecture and then when
it didn't pan out it was intended for 6.1 but now yet again it has been
pushed to a 6.2 target.

I can't help feeling that this is a big issue in how SlimServer is
architected and may not be so easy to remedy. No consumer product
should really lock out users for long lengths of time however my library
size is hardly typical consumer either so that is unfair. If people with
much more typical libraries are seeing this then it's an issue though.
I feel the display, IR remote and playback should be threaded
separately from the other processes such that they can continue to
function without interruption. mp3 playback (no transcoding) is a very
light cpu task and the DB searches now seem lightning fast in their
responses - it's the subsequent data handling and the library scan task
that seems to kill anything - which to me ( as a novice programmer)
seems something that shouldn't be happening, but may be a bi-product of
Perl or something.. In a way I wish a big development pause/splurge
could be had on the fundamental performance issues of SlimServer rather
than fancy new features, but that's not so interesting to people I
guess. The open source side does tend to become a bit of a
rollercoaster sometimes - but that's why I love SlimServer too - all the
new things that it can do . My purchase has grown in functionality for free.

I am hanging on in there for this fix as SlimServer is potentially
such a great product for me (if it worked) , the current situation is
very fragile though. The fact that player actions effect other players
(stalling / interrupting music) is my main problem. I control via AMX
and Crestron and these modules get really messed around by stalls in the
CLI interface too. But, I'll wait to 6.2 and pin my hopes on that once
more. No other solution is as accessible and flexible for me as
SlimServer and fits so well into my HA setup so fingers crossed. Indeed
I'm struggling at the moment to find an alternative or I might have
jumped already.


Kevin

[dean]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no,but I can tell you what *isn't* working for me..

Kevin,

Which bug numbers describe the issues you are having? Scanning and
searching should NOT take as long as you describe.

-dean

[CouchPotatoe]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tellyou what *isn't* working for me..

dean blackketter wrote:

> Kevin,
>
> Which bug numbers describe the issues you are having? Scanning and
> searching should NOT take as long as you describe.
>
> -dean
>
>
Hi dean,

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=399

Kevin

[dean]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no,but I can tell you what *isn't* working for me..

Thanks, is there a bug about your scanning performance issues?

On Aug 4, 2005, at 7:57 AM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:

> dean blackketter wrote:
>
>
>> Kevin,
>>
>> Which bug numbers describe the issues you are having? Scanning
>> and searching should NOT take as long as you describe.
>>
>> -dean
>>
>>
>>
> Hi dean,
>
> http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=399
>
> Kevin
>
>

[radish]

I'm still surprised how many people are running SS on dedicated multi-proc boxes...

[CouchPotatoe]

Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tellyou what *isn't* working for me..

No - I haven't filed a bug as I have only just experienced this in a
6.2 nightly . Previously I have kept my library DB between installs so I
don't know how long it's been there. I know some changes were made
recently to the DB duplicates issue and that maybe related. It maybe
something that isn't a bug in the 6.1 released version. I did make an
adjacent post (today) in a thread entitles "Re-Scan problems".

kevin

dean blackketter wrote:

> Thanks, is there a bug about your scanning performance issues?
>
> On Aug 4, 2005, at 7:57 AM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>
>> dean blackketter wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Kevin,
>>>
>>> Which bug numbers describe the issues you are having? Scanning
>>> and searching should NOT take as long as you describe.
>>>
>>> -dean
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Hi dean,
>>
>> http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=399
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>

[Craig, James (IT)]

Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

I was just thinking that.
Surely overkill for what we all know is a single threaded process?

I run SlimServer on my office desktop, which I frequently use heavily
while playing music on SlimServer and I have no problems apart from
during the rescan, which I have scheduled to run at night.

(almost 10,000 MP3s on a 2Ghz 512Mb PC)

James
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[Marshall Clow]

Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

At 4:28 PM +0100 8/4/05, Craig, James (IT) wrote:
>I was just thinking that.
>Surely overkill for what we all know is a single threaded process?
>
>I run SlimServer on my office desktop, which I frequently use heavily
>while playing music on SlimServer and I have no problems apart from
>during the rescan, which I have scheduled to run at night.
>
>(almost 10,000 MP3s on a 2Ghz 512Mb PC)

I've set up a dedicated server: a mac mini with an external FireWire drive.
1/25 GHz G4, 512 MB RAM.

Works great to drive two or three players. Library is about 11K tracks.
--
-- Marshall

Marshall Clow Idio Software <mailto:marshall (AT) idio (DOT) com>

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.