I'm glad I saw this thread as I was beginning to think that I was the only one experiencing constant and long-term issues with SlimServer performance. I've run SS on lots of different boxes (always Windows XP, fastest machine was 3.2Hhx with 1gb RAM) and wired/wireless networks and the performance of SS has always been less than ideal. Currently I have a library of about 275gb consisting of 805 flac albums (8952 songs and 1197 artists) on a Maxtor OneTouch 300gb USB drive. I almost always use the remote.
I have been exploring Linux/Unix recently to see if I can improve performance by using a spare work machine solely dedidated to SS. Unfortunately my experiments were stymied by the NTFS file system on the Maxtor and I fought shy of reformatting the disk with a Unix file system. However, in between Linux/Unix experiments I thought I would try a clean install of XP Home SP2 and cut it down as much as I possibly could, taking out all extraneous services, windows gubbins etc and give priority to background services. I am not running any other programs other than SS (not even a virus checker or windows firewall). This installation is specifically aimed at running SS as effiently as is possible. No power management. Wired. Squeezebox 2. No other network activity. Unfortunately this laptop is not a high spec machine. It only has a 500ghz P3 processor and O.5gb Ram. Is this considered to be too underpowered to run as a dedicated SS machine? What is SlimDevices minimum spec for XP running SS? I've had a good look around but not found any recommendations. I've experimented. I am running the 6.1.1 download from the SD home page. My problem is definitely with processor usage. The processor usage always goes up to 99% whilst I am waiting for track/albumlistings to display. Using the remote, sometimes music listings can take an absolute age to appear... but unfortunately results do not appear to be consistant. In fact it seem that the problem is much worse when I first use the remote. After a few goes at browsing menus things appear to improve. The most consistently bad result is browsing albums, i.e. Genres>Pop>Albums. Using this type of path it can take almost a minute to list albums and meanwhile the music stops playing. Unfortunately the album listing is my most used menu path. At this moment all seems fast, so am flummoxed. But, "turning off" the Squeezebox2 by hitting the remote's power button once, and then turning it back on again seem to bring back the very slow display of album listings (at least at first). Is there some sort of caching going on? The other annoyance (minor in comparison) is that using the remote's up and down buttons (tapping lightly) can often cause it to skip a listing (i.e. does not go to next track/album, but goes to the next but one). So, at this moment it sort of appears that if I use SS all the time there is no problem and that the problem of very slow track/album listings might only occur when I first start using the remote. Although I am currently using an underpowered laptop these findings are consistent with all my experience on a variety of much higher spec machines. BTW. It was very interesting to see that on the same machine with Linux/BSD installed (with Gui) browsing all the SS web interface menus (e.g server or player settings) was much, much faster (almost immediate) than on the XP minimal install, even though it took much longer for Firefox to open on the Linux/BSD installs than it did on the XP install. Any thoughts would be very welcome. MC -- ModelCitizen _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
