Main music server: - 23260 songs, 1468 albums, 985 artists (and growing) - Mix of FLAC, Ogg, and MP3 - Athlon XP 1400+ - 768M RAM - Three drives totaling 480G (retail, real available space: 392G) - *Loud* mofo that sits in my mechanical room downstairs - FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - SlimServer 6.2.2 - 1 SB3 Wired
In the last few weeks I've worked on building a new music server using an old machine (original build c. 1997). I'm trying to sell a neighbor on an SB3 that I'll set up for him, and I'll throw in the server for him. Also, as I said my main server is loud and placed in my mechanical room. At the time I set that up, it made sense because my SB1G was upstairs, well out of earshot. I have an SB3 up there now and moved the SB1G to my den, which is right next to that mechanical room. Unfortunately, the loudness of that machine is rather distracting when attempting to listen to music in the den, and I recently acquired some new music for which I really want to get some good listening sessions (http://www.dcddiscs.com/). So another part of setting up this other server (which resides in my office, far enough away from the den that I can't hear it) is so I can listen to music in relative silence. Anyway, that server is currently: - 3161 songs, 273 albums, 121 artists. - Mostly MP3, 6 albums in FLAC - Athlon K6/233 - 64M RAM - 1 20G HD - FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE - SlimServer 6.2.2 - 1 SB1G Wired, plus the SB3 upstairs for testing. I have been pleasantly surprised at the results. Most of what I've read here indicated that I might have some trouble running SlimServer on such an underpowered machine, but so far it has performed flawlessly. Granted, I don't do anything crazy like try to do anything while scanning is in progress. Still, here are some general maximum CPU utilizations that I see (using `top`): - 5% idle - 20% SB1G playing MP3 - 30% SB1G playing FLAC (SlimServer + flac) - 20% SB3 playing MP3 or FLAC - 30% SB3 playing FLAC + SB1G playing MP3 - 42% SB3 playing FLAC + SB1G playing FLAC - 48% SB3 synched with SB1G playing FLAC - 20% SB3 synched with SB1G playing MP3 Most of that was not tested at length, but I've seen few problems. I listened for a few hours to the SB1G playing FLAC with no dropouts or problems with gapless transitions. "Synched playing FLAC" was the only test where I encountered any problems, and that was only that the sync was off by a fraction of a second. I've not played with synching much, but my guess is that this is because the SB3 will play the FLAC natively but the SB1 needed transcoding and that there was perhaps some unaccounted for delay. Synching with MP3 worked great. Again, I'm really impressed that it all works on such low spec hardware. Hopefully it still works when I put in a 120G drive and load it up with FLACs. If it does I'll be happy because I won't have to give my neighbor one of my better machines. :) -- eq72521 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eq72521's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1512 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23701 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
