[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

There is a server performance option about how many songs to do in a
block (or some such wording). I was hoping it would make scanning
performance better (or at least more disciplined). If it had an effect
it was lost on me.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[max . spicer]

The first thing that 6.2 will do is trigger a full rescan of your
collection.  Whilst this is taking place, the performance will likely
be terrible.  However, if you let it get on with it and give it time to
complete (probably a lot of time with that many tracks!), things should
soon become nice and fast.  There really needs to be a warning that
this rescan is happening - if you don't use the web interface, you're
none the wiser.  Fortunately, the number of situations that will
require another full rescan are getting fewer and fewer.

Max

Free Lunch Wrote: 
> Encouraged by the news that recent 6.2 nightly builds solved
> performance issues, I tried the 10-12 nightly with my original
> Slimp3..  Unfortunately, it was much worse than 5.4.1 with my 48K
> track library.
> 
> Playback would stop as soon as I tried to access the main web
> interface.   Menu navigation also caused drop outs.  This was while I
> was playing FLAC files (so it would be transcoding).  The server runs
> on a dedicated linux box (XP2200 with 512MB). I did wait for the
> rescan to complete.
> 
> So, back to 5.4.1... again... :-(
> (which wouldn't run until I restored my original config files).
> 
> I've wanted to buy a squeezebox for a long while.. But it is hard to
> do when 6.x doesn't work with my slimp3.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michael Herger]

Playback would stop as soon as I tried to access the main web
interface.   Menu navigation also caused drop outs.  This was while I
was playing FLAC files (so it would be transcoding).  The server runs
on a dedicated linux box (XP2200 with 512MB). I did wait for the
rescan to complete.


This is definetly not normal behaviour. While most of my collection is MP3  
I'm happily running slimserver on such low spec machines as a Via C3/600  
to feed real streams to my SliMP3 - running mplayer -> lame transcoding.


Do you have some more details about what exactly you did when you  
encountered the drop outs? What page? What menu on the player? etc. With  
no information about problems there won't be a fix.



I've wanted to buy a squeezebox for a long while.. But it is hard to
do when 6.x doesn't work with my slimp3.


You could expect much better performance from a SB2 for at least two  
important reasons: native FLAC support (no transcoding needed) and a huge  
buffer memory.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Free Lunch]

Encouraged by the news that recent 6.2 nightly builds solved
performance issues, I tried the 10-12 nightly with my original
Slimp3..  Unfortunately, it was much worse than 5.4.1 with my 48K
track library.

Playback would stop as soon as I tried to access the main web
interface.   Menu navigation also caused drop outs.  This was while I
was playing FLAC files (so it would be transcoding).  The server runs
on a dedicated linux box (XP2200 with 512MB). I did wait for the
rescan to complete.

So, back to 5.4.1... again... :-(
(which wouldn't run until I restored my original config files).

I've wanted to buy a squeezebox for a long while.. But it is hard to
do when 6.x doesn't work with my slimp3.
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Triode]

Triode. I ran Server and Network Health as you asked. Here is the
output. It's not perfect but doesn't appear worrying. I wonder how much
running the web interface and the annoying refresh on the laptop server
influenced the figures (I've just realised that there was also a second
instance of the web interface open on my network at the time)? I ran it
for about three quarters of an hour.



Server looks healthy to me.  Something happened once which took 10 seconds to complete, but as it is a once off I would say there is 
nothing to worry about.  [especially as you had two browser sessions open.]


Enjoy 6.2 ...


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Yehaah!
6.2 has sorted my problems. I'be been playing with SS for about 2 hours
now and am really impressed. Now I can browse all menus perfectly
quickly using the remote and all seems to be very, very well indeed.
I'd just like to say a huge great thank you to the people who worked to
get this going. This really has made my decade.

Just for those who might think that SlimServer needs a large amount of
hardware, this is the current spec for my dedicated (and so far very
stable) SlimServer laptop:

Dell Latitude 500 Mhz P3, 192mb RAM.
Windows XP Home SP2 (fresh install) - all extraneous Windows stuff
uninstalled or turned off, generally slimmed down as much as possible,
disabled all unused hardware and services, only runs SlimServer,
priority given to background services, no firewall, no virus checkers,
no software, no power saving, defragged before placing in draw and
forgetting about it).

Total machine RAM usage (Commit Charge) is stable at 113mb. Processor
usage during playing hovers between 3% and 6%. However processor usage
jumps to 100% when I choose a big menu item (i.e. Genres > Ambient >
All albums, which holds 155 flac albums) but does this for less than a
second and then the menu displays (i.e pretty instant in my book).
All music is flac. Squeezebox2 is currently wired.
Library stats:  817 albums with 9086 songs by 1200 artists
Music is held in Maxtor OneTouch 300gb USB drive via USB 1.

Ha ha. I can't believe how happy I am! At last I can sell the Naim
CDX!
-

Triode. I ran Server and Network Health as you asked. Here is the
output. It's not perfect but doesn't appear worrying. I wonder how much
running the web interface and the annoying refresh on the laptop server
influenced the figures (I've just realised that there was also a second
instance of the web interface open on my network at the time)? I ran it
for about three quarters of an hour.

Player Performance : Squeezebox2
The graphs shown here record the long term trend for each of the player
performance measurements below. They display the number and percentage
of measurements which fall within each measurement band.
It is imporant to leave the player playing for a while and then assess
the graphs. 

Buffer Fullness
This graph shows the fill of the player's buffer. Higher buffer
fullness is better. Note the buffer is only filled while the player is
playing tracks.
Squeezebox1 uses a small buffer and it is expected to stay full while
playing. If this value drops to 0 it will result in audio dropouts.
This is likely to be due to network problems.

Squeezebox2 uses a large buffer. This drains to 0 at the end of each
track and then refills for the next track. You should only be concerned
if the buffer fill is not high for the majority of the time a track is
playing.

Playing remote streams can lead to low buffer fill as the player needs
to wait for data from the remote server. This is not a cause for
concern. 

< 10 :   47 :  2% #
< 20 :1 :  0% 
< 30 :3 :  0% 
< 40 :2 :  0% 
< 50 :1 :  0% 
< 60 :4 :  0% 
< 70 :7 :  0% 
< 80 :4 :  0% 
< 90 :7 :  0% 
< 100 : 2151 : 97%

>=100 :0 :  0% 
max  : 99.68
min  : 0.00
avg  : 97.271767

Control Connection
This graph shows the number of messages queued up to send to the player
over the control connection. A measurement is taken every time a new
message is sent to the player. Values above 1-2 indicate potential
network congestion or that the player has become disconnected. 
< 1 :   28 :100%
##
< 2 :0 :  0% 
< 5 :0 :  0% 
< 10 :0 :  0% 
< 20 :0 :  0% 
>=20 :0 :  0% 
max  : 0.00
min  : -1.00
avg  : -0.035714




Server Performance
The graphs shown here record the long term trend for each of the server
performance measurements below. They display the number and percentage
of measurements which fall within each measurement band. 
Server Response Time
This graph shows the length of time between slimserver responding to
requests from any player. It is measured in seconds. Lower numbers are
better. If you notice response times of over 1 second this could lead
to problems with audio performance.
The cause of long response times could be either other programs running
on the server or slimserver processing a complex task. 

< 0.002 :31298 : 75% #
< 0.005 : 7096 : 17% 
< 0.01 :  112 :  0% 
< 0.015 : 2368 :  6% ##
< 0.025 :  269 :  1% 
< 0.05 :   35 :  0% 
< 0.1 :  248 :  1% 
< 0.5 :  175 :  0% 
< 1 :   10 :  0% 
< 5 :   12 :  0% 
>=5 :1 :  0% 
max  : 10.112766
min  : -0.008646
avg  : 0.004213

Timer Accuracy
Slimserver uses a timer mechanism to trigger events such a

Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Triode]

As a suggestion - how about the welcome screen showing something differerent 
when a player is turned on and the server is scanning?



At the very least, it needs to be made very obvious to the user via
release notes and, preferably, a large bit of text next to the download
link!  I wonder how many people have tried a 6.2 build, noticed the slow
performance, assumed that that was what they should expect from 6.2 and
so given up?

Max

ModelCitizen Wrote: 

Triode was right. I did not realise that a rescan had been forced as the
app did not inform me this was going to happen. I know it's been raised
before but some sort of progress indicator would be very useful too.
MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

I think the hope was that scanning would improve and this would not be
necessary. I know they are trying to improve scanning performance. But
in the mean time, I think a message, on the unit as well as at the web
interface, that scanning is occurring, would be a very wise thing. I'm
sure people have been ticked off by it, because, as several people have
pointed out, it's part of the first impression.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[max . spicer]

At the very least, it needs to be made very obvious to the user via
release notes and, preferably, a large bit of text next to the download
link!  I wonder how many people have tried a 6.2 build, noticed the slow
performance, assumed that that was what they should expect from 6.2 and
so given up?

Max

ModelCitizen Wrote: 
> Triode was right. I did not realise that a rescan had been forced as the
> app did not inform me this was going to happen. I know it's been raised
> before but some sort of progress indicator would be very useful too.
> MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

max.spicer Wrote: 
> Whenever I've done an upgrade that has forced a server rescan, it's
> never told me that's what it's going to do.  My player becomes totally
> unresponsive during a rescan, which I imagine would be quite alarming
> if you didn't know what was going on.  It's certainly not the first
> impression of the new version that you want users to have!
> Max Triode was right. I did not realise that a rescan had been forced as
the app did not inform me this was going to happen. I know it's been
raised before but some sort of progress indicator would be very useful
too.
MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[max . spicer]

Whenever I've done an upgrade that has forced a server rescan, it's
never told me that's what it's going to do.  My player becomes totally
unresponsive during a rescan, which I imagine would be quite alarming
if you didn't know what was going on.  It's certainly not the first
impression of the new version that you want users to have!

Max

Triode Wrote: 
> >> Did that. And updated firmware. Slimserver took more than three
> seconds
> >> to respond to any request via the remote with the new version.
> Since
> >> then I have been trying to revert to my previous SS version,
> without
> >> success so far (lots of Squeezebox can't find SlimServer).
> >> MC
> >
> 
> Is this after allowing the server to rescan all of your music (which
> may take quite a while with a large library).  As the database 
> version changes between releases it is likely that at startup with a
> new version it needs to rescan the whole library to build a 
> consitent new database.
> 
> I would be interested in seeing what the Server Response Time graph in
> 6.2 shows after rescanning has completed [in Server and 
> Network Health].


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[gingerneil]

Hmm... 
Reading this entire thread has somehow managed to put me off my plans
of setting up a linkstation solution when I move house!
Current library is only 251 albums with 3357 songs by 402 artists.
Anyone care to comment on how a linkstation might perform with 2 SB2s
streaming ?? 
I VERY rarely use the web interface.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jess Askey]

It actually doesn't bother me that much at this point since the machine 
truly is a dog and I woudln't expect slimserver to run very well on it. 
Certainly, improvements in slimserver would be nice, but Im a perfectly 
happy customer right now. I used to OC the machine to 550Mhz but it 
doesn't seem to like that anymore (probably the power supply filter caps 
drying out). I just tried my fresh 6.2 Nightly install from last night 
and things are actually substantially snappier... no real delays over 1 
second at this point so far. So... THANK YOU SLIM TEAM!! (yeah, Im 
shouting) :-)




Triode wrote:


Jess,

Can I suggest you try the Random Mix plugin that is part of 6.2.  This 
provides an alternative way of randomly playing your music collection 
without the performance problem of shuffled play (for long lists)


Goto Plugins->Random Mix and select relavent option and press play.

I typically play on my squeezebox, the entire 'music' folder shuffled 
by song. So..




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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Jess Askey Wrote: 
> I have an under powered machine and here are my delay scenarios...
> 
> PII 366 Celeron, 384M RAM, 320gig UDMA-100 driver with PCI UDMA-100
> Controller
> 745 Albums, 12353 Songs
> Linux Mandrake 9.2 - BIND9, Postgresql, Slimserver
> the server did work just fine with my Audiotron.
One of the things you have to understand is that the Audiotron had it's
own processor doing one segment of the work you have now added to this
computer. Under the audiotron scenario, the server was just a file
server. MP3 tag scanning, and keeping the resulting 'database' was done
on the audiotron itself. Also the web server. Under the slim scenario,
all of this is now on the processor. Especially during tag scanning,
the resource footprint is considerably higher. 

After the 6.2 upgrade, if things still need improvement, here are some
things to consider:
1. add more memory - if you're running out of memory, it'll swap and
add to your I/O load, exactly when you need the I/O to be faster, it'll
be slower.
2. check your swapping configuration. I'm not familiar with your
operating system, but all O/Ses prefer contiguous fast swap areas.
3. if you can't add more memory, or can't add enough more, consider
buying another fast disk (can be much smaller) and dedicate it to
swap.

Tell us how it goes ...

Michael


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 17:57 -0700, Michaelwagner wrote:
> MrC Wrote: 
> > Can you say... swapping!
> Yeah, that sounds like more memory, if you can add it easily, might be
> a quick fix to get out of the problem for now. 

More memory is always good.
If you can't add it, change systems.

> However, I think development efforts should be made to print the
> footprint of slim down so this isn't such a problem.

Except that all software always grows as features are added.
I seriously doubt that a wimpy P2 with under 512 MB of ram will ever
again provide acceptable performance. Starter systems these days
have 512, and 1 gig is nothing.

Hardware is very cheap. It is just not a good engineering choice
for one niche product to fight the massive karma of most software.
Sometime soon, the SlimServer will need to be engineered for all
the dual CPU + dual hyperthread processors flowing around entry
level systems by Xmas 2006.

It is hard to develop rich software in limited hardware. The embedded
systems guys to it all the time, but they get paid serious
money to do it. The beauty of the SlimDevices design is that
the specialized hardware is slim and inexpensive, and you just
use any standard PC, Mac or *nix box you have.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

MrC Wrote: 
> Can you say... swapping!
Yeah, that sounds like more memory, if you can add it easily, might be
a quick fix to get out of the problem for now. 

However, I think development efforts should be made to print the
footprint of slim down so this isn't such a problem.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Robin Bowes Wrote: 
> I'm not necessarily advocating writing our own scheduling code - that's
> what the operating system is for!
Absolutely.
> If there is a need for 6 processes then why not have 6 operating system
> processes?
At least in the windows case, I'm sure there's a fair overhead to the
windows perl support. I know, for instance, that the windows perl
implementation creates a directory in temp with a bunch of
run-time-compiled code with serialized names. How well this scheme
scales is unclear to me. Anyone who has benchmarked it care to
comment?

Michael


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Triode]

Jess,

Can I suggest you try the Random Mix plugin that is part of 6.2.  This provides an alternative way of randomly playing your music 
collection without the performance problem of shuffled play (for long lists)


Goto Plugins->Random Mix and select relavent option and press play.


I typically play on my squeezebox, the entire 'music' folder shuffled by song. 
So..



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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[MrC]

Jess Askey Wrote: 
> PII 366 Celeron, 384M RAM, 320gig UDMA-100 driver with PCI UDMA-100 
> Controller
> 745 Albums, 12353 Songs
> Linux Mandrake 9.2 - BIND9, Postgresql, Slimserver
> 
> 1. I navigate to 'Browse Music Folder -> Music' and hit 'Play' on my
> remote.
> 2. At this point, the sqeezebox freezes for about 45 seconds (CPU on 
> server is at 98%)
> 
Can you say... swapping!


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jess Askey]

I have an under powered machine and here are my delay scenarios...

PII 366 Celeron, 384M RAM, 320gig UDMA-100 driver with PCI UDMA-100 
Controller

745 Albums, 12353 Songs
Linux Mandrake 9.2 - BIND9, Postgresql, Slimserver

I have my folders organized in the root music folder like this

Christmas (xmas music only here, don't want it mixed in with my other stuff)
Books (Books on tape, Pimsleur Language Rips, etc)
Elise (Kids music for my daughter)
Music (The master repository of all other music)
Lovewave (my band's music)

I typically play on my squeezebox, the entire 'music' folder shuffled by 
song. So..


1. I navigate to 'Browse Music Folder -> Music' and hit 'Play' on my remote.
2. At this point, the sqeezebox freezes for about 45 seconds (CPU on 
server is at 98%)
3. The display will show the first song playing but there will be no 
music at this point. If I press 'Now Playing' I can see the current song 
in the queue labeled as 'Playing' but not... and the song list count is 
growing (song 1 of X, where X is increasing as the playlist is being built).
4. At this point, even tho the song is not playing and the Squeezebox 
shows it as Playing, I hit Play and the song will then actually play.
5. After about 1-2 minutes of the song playing (playlist still 
building), the music generally stops for about 1-5 minutes until the 
playlist finishes building and then the song resumes where it halted.


At this point Im quite used to the routine so Im sure to start the 
process about 5 minutes before I actually need music. I have been hoping 
to upgrade my server but just have not had the time. However, the server 
did work just fine with my Audiotron.


I just installed the 6.2 nightly last night to see if anything improved 
but I have not been home yet to try. I will report back... Im excited to 
hear that 6.2 may improve my delay issues.



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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Triode]

Did that. And updated firmware. Slimserver took more than three seconds
to respond to any request via the remote with the new version. Since
then I have been trying to revert to my previous SS version, without
success so far (lots of Squeezebox can't find SlimServer).
MC




Is this after allowing the server to rescan all of your music (which may take quite a while with a large library).  As the database 
version changes between releases it is likely that at startup with a new version it needs to rescan the whole library to build a 
consitent new database.


I would be interested in seeing what the Server Response Time graph in 6.2 shows after rescanning has completed [in Server and 
Network Health].


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Dan Sully Wrote: 
> If I recall, in a previous thread (or maybe this one), you said that you
> were running 6.1.x. Please upgrade to the 6.2 nightlies - the browse
> genres issue has been fixed there.
> -D
> 
> Did that. And updated firmware. Slimserver took more than three seconds
> to respond to any request via the remote with the new version. Since
> then I have been trying to revert to my previous SS version, without
> success so far (lots of Squeezebox can't find SlimServer).
> MC


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Free Lunch]

On 10/12/05, Patrick Dixon
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I also think it would be useful to be able to cancel tasks that are
> taking too long: I seem to regularly accidentally ask the server to
> play 'everything' (I'm pretty stupid, I know), and my server literally
> goes away for minutes!  It's usually quicker for me to ssh in and
> restart slimserver than wait for it to come back of it's own accord.

That isn't stupid. Stupid is not being able to do that.


  FL
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Dan Sully]

* ModelCitizen shaped the electrons to say...


I don't understand why, for me, most of the browse functions work well
while some almost always crash the music and leave me waiting.
I'd be very glad if someone above who stated that SlimServer
performance was acceptable on a (preferably not hugely specced) Windows
machine could use the *remote* to call up Browse Genres > A Genre With a
Lot of Albums > All Albums, and let me know if performance is fine with
this menu choice.


If I recall, in a previous thread (or maybe this one), you said that you were
running 6.1.x. Please upgrade to the 6.2 nightlies - the browse genres issue
has been fixed there.

-D
--
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Richie]

> > If I choose Browse Music > Browse Genres > Rock > All Albums from the
> > Squeezebox2 using the remote, the list appears with no detectable (< 1
> > second) delay. There are 513 albums in this genre. Using SS6.2
> > nightlies on Win XP SP2 with an Athlon 1.4GHz with 768MB RAM.
> > RichardIf it's not too much trouble, could either you or Michael tell me if 
> > the
> listing renders as fast if it is the first menu you navigate to after
> you've stopped and started SlimServer, or even, if there is any
> noticeable time difference at all? I can't see why this should make a
> difference but it appears as if it might for me.
> Thanks
> MC

I just tried it, stopped slimserver, restarted and the response was
just as quick. I couldn't tell any difference.

Richard
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Richie Wrote: 
> If I choose Browse Music > Browse Genres > Rock > All Albums from the
> Squeezebox2 using the remote, the list appears with no detectable (< 1
> second) delay. There are 513 albums in this genre. Using SS6.2
> nightlies on Win XP SP2 with an Athlon 1.4GHz with 768MB RAM.
> RichardIf it's not too much trouble, could either you or Michael tell me if 
> the
listing renders as fast if it is the first menu you navigate to after
you've stopped and started SlimServer, or even, if there is any
noticeable time difference at all? I can't see why this should make a
difference but it appears as if it might for me.
Thanks
MC


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Richie]

> I'd be very glad if someone above who stated that SlimServer
> performance was acceptable on a (preferably not hugely specced) Windows
> machine could use the *remote* to call up Browse Genres > A Genre With a
> Lot of Albums > All Albums, and let me know if performance is fine with
> this menu choice.
>
> Unfortunately this is a favourite menu choice of mine but I cannot use
> it at all.
>
> MC

If I choose Browse Music > Browse Genres > Rock > All Albums from the
Squeezebox2 using the remote, the list appears with no detectable (< 1
second) delay. There are 513 albums in this genre. Using SS6.2
nightlies on Win XP SP2 with an Athlon 1.4GHz with 768MB RAM.

Richard
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Robin Bowes]

Michaelwagner said the following on 12/10/2005 15:17:
Robin Bowes Wrote: 


If the core code is broken out into separate threads/processes with
clearly defined interfaces then each process can be written in whatever
language you like. I think each core element of the code should have its
own process/thread rather than just one as you suggest. 6 processes 
would be not much harder to implement than 2.



In theory I agree with you.

In practice, I was looking at what is practical and achieveable in a
short time and with limited staff resources. I wasn't advocating
writing our own generalized scheduler/dispatcher. I was advocating
running 2 copies of perl, one with the time-critical stuff, one with
the rest. And prioritize the time-critical one higher. Let the
operating system dispatch the two of them.


I'm not necessarily advocating writing our own scheduling code - that's 
what the operating system is for!



You don't want to have 6 because you don't want 6 operating system
processes running.


Why not? If there is a need for 6 processes then why not have 6 
operating system processes?


Some of the best software I use is written by djb (http://cr.yp.to). 
Daemontools, ucspi-tcp, qmail, etc. Lots of small programs that do a 
specific task well. YOu get the functionality by chaining the processes 
together, e.g. to start the qmail smtp listener you use something like:


exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 300 \
/usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -R -l "$LOCAL" \
-x /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c "$MAXSMTPD" \
-u "$QMAILDUID" -g "$NOFILESGID" 0 \
smtp /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd 2>&1

That's softlimit running tcpserver (which handles the tcp 
communications) running qmail-smtpd.


Logging is done by piping the output of this process to yet another process.

If slimserver were written in a similar way it would make development 
and maintenance much easier.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michael Herger]

What's "a Lot of Albums"? 100? 1000?

Michael, a mere 122 under Browse Music > Browse Genres > Ambient > All
Albums


This is not huge enough a number to make me understand the delay you  
encounter. I have 87 albums in the largest genre I found, and they show up  
in about 1-2 seconds on a Via C3/1GHz (Linux, though). Windows XP on a  
P4/2.66GHz serves them instantly, no noticeable delay at all.


Not much of help, I guess, but you wanted numbers :-)

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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

mherger Wrote: 
> > I'd be very glad if someone above who stated that SlimServer
> > performance was acceptable on a (preferably not hugely specced)
> Windows
> > machine could use the *remote* to call up Browse Genres > A Genre
> With a
> > Lot of Albums > All Albums, and let me know if performance is fine
> with
> > this menu choice.
> What's "a Lot of Albums"? 100? 1000?
> 
> Michael, a mere 122 under Browse Music > Browse Genres > Ambient > All
> Albums
> 
> MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Robin Bowes Wrote: 
> If the core code is broken out into separate threads/processes with
> clearly defined interfaces then each process can be written in whatever
> language you like. I think each core element of the code should have its
> own process/thread rather than just one as you suggest. 6 processes 
> would be not much harder to implement than 2.

In theory I agree with you.

In practice, I was looking at what is practical and achieveable in a
short time and with limited staff resources. I wasn't advocating
writing our own generalized scheduler/dispatcher. I was advocating
running 2 copies of perl, one with the time-critical stuff, one with
the rest. And prioritize the time-critical one higher. Let the
operating system dispatch the two of them.

You don't want to have 6 because you don't want 6 operating system
processes running.

Michael


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Robin Bowes]

Michaelwagner said the following on 12/10/2005 14:22:
Robin Bowes Wrote: 


However, the current architecture is such that any blocking operation
will interrupt audio streaming if it blocks for long enough.



From looking at the code, it seems that perl has no built-in interrupt

handling or dispatching, and that all dispatching is being handled by
hand-written code. So the operation doesn't have to block, it just has
to call some subroutine that takes a while (like an sql call), and
that's all she wrote.


Exactly. But that relies on everyone writing code for slimserver to 
yield regularly if their code take any length of time to execute.



It's more about spreading the processing power between the necessary
processes. The core "real-time" processes need to run uninterrupted,
e.g. audio streaming, display update, response to remote, etc. Other
stuff, like playlist management, scanning, etc. need as much CPU as
possible but without interrupting the core processes. This would be
easier to achieve with a multi-process/thread architecture.


Multi-process/multi-thread is fairly complex and this isn't the right
language. But 2 process/thread is more achievable, given the tools and
the language, and I believe adequate to the task at hand. It won't
solve the problem that 14 people in a library pounding away at the web
interface will get lousy response, but that's not really the intended
use.


Language is irrelevant. multi-process/multi-thread systems can be 
written in pretty much any language. qpsmtpd is an example of a program 
written in perl that can multi-task and handle high loads.



A separate perl low-level routine that just kept the active clients fed
with music and display information and serviced remote control keyclicks
(all the time-critical stuff) would actually simplify all the rest of
the code, which then wouldn't have to mess with timers and "make sure I
don't do too much" code. And it could serve as the model for a rewrite
in C down the road.


I don't think a re-write in C would help - that's analogous to throwing 
hardware horsepower at the problem.


If the core code is broken out into separate threads/processes with 
clearly defined interfaces then each process can be written in whatever 
language you like. I think each core element of the code should have its 
own process/thread rather than just one as you suggest. 6 processes 
would be not much harder to implement than 2.


R.
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and his wife's not there,
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[radish]

Michaelwagner Wrote: 
> And it could serve as the model for a rewrite in C down the road.
I thought we were supposed to be -improving- things? :)


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Robin Bowes Wrote: 
> However, the current architecture is such that any blocking operation
> will interrupt audio streaming if it blocks for long enough.
>From looking at the code, it seems that perl has no built-in interrupt
handling or dispatching, and that all dispatching is being handled by
hand-written code. So the operation doesn't have to block, it just has
to call some subroutine that takes a while (like an sql call), and
that's all she wrote.

> It's more about spreading the processing power between the necessary
> processes. The core "real-time" processes need to run uninterrupted,
> e.g. audio streaming, display update, response to remote, etc. Other
> stuff, like playlist management, scanning, etc. need as much CPU as
> possible but without interrupting the core processes. This would be
> easier to achieve with a multi-process/thread architecture.
Multi-process/multi-thread is fairly complex and this isn't the right
language. But 2 process/thread is more achievable, given the tools and
the language, and I believe adequate to the task at hand. It won't
solve the problem that 14 people in a library pounding away at the web
interface will get lousy response, but that's not really the intended
use.

A separate perl low-level routine that just kept the active clients fed
with music and display information and serviced remote control keyclicks
(all the time-critical stuff) would actually simplify all the rest of
the code, which then wouldn't have to mess with timers and "make sure I
don't do too much" code. And it could serve as the model for a rewrite
in C down the road.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Robin Bowes]

Music Machine said the following on 11/10/2005 23:13:

Two cents from the Peanut Gallery

It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
posts to the contrary.


My slimserver installation is currently reporting:

1273 albums with 12943 songs by 529 artists

I run Fedora Core 4 Linux on a (dual) P3 1GHz processor with 1.5GB RAM. 
This box is also my mail server, web server, database server, samba 
server, etc. I also use a MySQL backend and always run the latest dev. 
code from svn trunk.


Normal operation is fine. In fact, I've never had any *real* problems 
with slimserver.


However, the current architecture is such that any blocking operation 
will interrupt audio streaming if it blocks for long enough.


As Model Citizen rightly says, I have been advocating breaking the code 
up into separate processes or threads for sometime. I have also 
discussed this at some length with Dan.


Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to contribute much time/effort to 
developing code at the moment and the Slim team are even more busy so 
the initiative is on the back-burner.



On the surface it looks like data handling is the bottleneck, not
processing power.


It's more about spreading the processing power between the necessary 
processes. The core "real-time" processes need to run uninterrupted, 
e.g. audio streaming, display update, response to remote, etc. Other 
stuff, like playlist management, scanning, etc. need as much CPU as 
possible but without interrupting the core processes. This would be 
easier to achieve with a multi-process/thread architecture.


R.
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and his wife's not there,
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Patrick Dixon]

> I don't understand why, for me, most of the browse functions work well
> while some almost always crash the music and leave me waiting.I don't 
> actually think you are crashing the server (I'm running from
svn, the server is up 24/7 and I haven't had a crash for ages - so it's
very robust these days); SS is just going away to build the list you've
requested from the dB.  I think there's also some caching going on,
which is probably why it seems slower the first time you do it.

I have 900+ albums on my very low spec server (but I'm generally only
using one SB2 at a time) so I think it's unfair to expect instant
responses for time consuming tasks (like dB searches).  The SS
equilvalent of the hourglass would be fine as far as I'm concerned.  I
just hate the 'no busses for ages and then 15 turn up at once' approach
of the current code!


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www.at-view.co.uk
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michael Herger]

I'd be very glad if someone above who stated that SlimServer
performance was acceptable on a (preferably not hugely specced) Windows
machine could use the *remote* to call up Browse Genres > A Genre With a
Lot of Albums > All Albums, and let me know if performance is fine with
this menu choice.


What's "a Lot of Albums"? 100? 1000?

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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Patrick Dixon Wrote: 
> See http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2081
> I also think it would be useful to be able to cancel tasks that are
> taking too long: I seem to regularly accidentally ask the server to
> play 'everything' (I'm pretty stupid, I know), and my server literally
> goes away for minutes!  It's usually quicker for me to ssh in and
> restart slimserver than wait for it to come back of it's own accord.
I completely agree with Patricks comments.
I don't understand why, for me, most of the browse functions work well
while some almost always crash the music and leave me waiting.
I'd be very glad if someone above who stated that SlimServer
performance was acceptable on a (preferably not hugely specced) Windows
machine could use the *remote* to call up Browse Genres > A Genre With a
Lot of Albums > All Albums, and let me know if performance is fine with
this menu choice.

Unfortunately this is a favourite menu choice of mine but I cannot use
it at all.

MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Patrick Dixon]

radish Wrote: 
> Personally I have no problem with CPU or memory usage in SlimServer -
> most people's complaints seem to be response time.
> 
> I personally suspect that adding some threading would help, as it does
> whenever you have blocking I/O and a mixture of event and non-event
> driven processing. However, I wouldn't do any work on it without much
> more evidence that that. We need to configure a system to breaking
> point and find out what's going on inside.
See http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2081

I personally think it is essential to improve the remote response
times: I don't mind waiting for a search or browse function providing
I'm aware that something is going on; but getting no response at all is
both confusing and frustrating.

I also think it would be useful to be able to cancel tasks that are
taking too long: I seem to regularly accidentally ask the server to
play 'everything' (I'm pretty stupid, I know), and my server literally
goes away for minutes!  It's usually quicker for me to ssh in and
restart slimserver than wait for it to come back of it's own accord.


-- 
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Dan Sully]

* Michaelwagner shaped the electrons to say...


Blind optimization (i.e. looking for things which might be slow and
rewriting them in a way which might be faster - or might not be) is a
huge waste of time and resources and almost never fixes anything
useful.


Agreed. 
Does perl have a profiler?

I assume it has some cute name like pp (perl profiler)?


Perl has multiple profilers available.

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=devel%3A%3Aprofile&mode=all

-D
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

my stats: 548 albums, 8390 songs, 2251 artists.
1.8GHz P4 512MB RAM W2K SP4 200GB in 2 hard disks.
dual monitor (doubt that effects anything, though).


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

radish Wrote: 
> I personally suspect that adding some threading would help
Likely true, but as you say, needs more analysis and better tools
before committing resources to it.
> Blind optimization (i.e. looking for things which might be slow and
> rewriting them in a way which might be faster - or might not be) is a
> huge waste of time and resources and almost never fixes anything
> useful.
Agreed. 
Does perl have a profiler?
I assume it has some cute name like pp (perl profiler)?


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[radish]

Music Machine Wrote: 
> 
> It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
> around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
> the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
> quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
> posts to the contrary.
> 
I have over 800 albums, running on Windows, no problems (as I've stated
in many threads). The OS is not the problem - Perl runs just fine on
Windows, no more or less performant than any other platform. Now
whether Perl would be my language of choice for such a system, well
that's another matter - but I don't think it affects performance in any
significant way. You also need to decide what you're optimizing for -
memory usage, response time, or cpu usage. Pick one (or if you're
lucky, two). Personally I have no problem with CPU or memory usage in
SlimServer - most people's complaints seem to be response time.

I personally suspect that adding some threading would help, as it does
whenever you have blocking I/O and a mixture of event and non-event
driven processing. However, I wouldn't do any work on it without much
more evidence that that. We need to configure a system to breaking
point and find out what's going on inside. I don't know what the
current state of the art w.r.t Perl live debugging and analysis tools
is, I'm a Java/C# man, but that kind of info is essential in this type
of exercise. Blind optimization (i.e. looking for things which might be
slow and rewriting them in a way which might be faster - or might not
be) is a huge waste of time and resources and almost never fixes
anything useful.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Richie]

> It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
> around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
> the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
> quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
> posts to the contrary.

I've well over 1000 albums on a 1.4 GHz Athlon. Performance is absolutely fine.

Richard
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RE: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Richard Scales]

And another 2c:

I ran Slimserver (up to 5.4) on a dual PII-733 box, 1GB RAM for several
years - mostly OK. I now run the latest 'official' release on a P4 3Ghz box
with 1.5GB RAM under Windows 2003 Small Business Server and it mostly
performs at rocket speed - there are however significant delays (3-8
seconds) when navigating right from 'browse artists' or 'browse albums'
before the list of artists/albums is displayed. Once displayed I can
navigate through the list at high speed.

I suspect that the source of my particular problem is as follows: 
2596 albums with 48489 songs by 6223 artists

Regards
Richard
 

-Original Message-
From: Jack Coates [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: 12 October 2005 03:01
To: Slim Devices Discussion
Subject: Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

Music Machine wrote:

>Two cents from the Peanut Gallery
>
>It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
>around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
>the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
>quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
>posts to the contrary.
>
>On the surface it looks like data handling is the bottleneck, not
>processing power.
>
>I have no problems running SS on w2k with a 800mhz PIII and only 256
>meg ram.  My database has a little less than 350 albums.
>
>Regards,
>Music Machine
>  
>
728 albums with 8504 songs by 755 artists

My performance is still fine on 6.1.1, though there can be some slowness 
in browsing music. I guess I'd better quit buying albums :)

-- 
Jack At Monkeynoodle Dot Org: It's A Scientific Venture!
"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin
so across the Western ocean I must wander" -- trad.

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jack Coates]

Music Machine wrote:


Two cents from the Peanut Gallery

It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
posts to the contrary.

On the surface it looks like data handling is the bottleneck, not
processing power.

I have no problems running SS on w2k with a 800mhz PIII and only 256
meg ram.  My database has a little less than 350 albums.

Regards,
Music Machine
 


728 albums with 8504 songs by 755 artists

My performance is still fine on 6.1.1, though there can be some slowness 
in browsing music. I guess I'd better quit buying albums :)


--
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"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin
so across the Western ocean I must wander" -- trad.

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 15:13 -0700, Music Machine wrote:
> It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
> around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
> the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
> quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
> posts to the contrary.

I've bought a small number of albums since I upgraded my server. 
Right now, SS says "Your music library contains 707 albums with 10480
songs by 1188 artists."

I was quiet happy with the performance on my P3-500 w/384mB of ram.

More power is always good, but then, I'm not at your magic 750 number.
It is not clear to me what the important number is, number of albums,
or songs, or artists.


-- 
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Music Machine]

Two cents from the Peanut Gallery

It seems like people are pretty happy with performance if they have
around 350 or less albums in the database.  750 albums or more is about
the place where no one seems satisfied with performance.  Between those
quantities satisfaction varies quite a bit.  I could easily have missed
posts to the contrary.

On the surface it looks like data handling is the bottleneck, not
processing power.

I have no problems running SS on w2k with a 800mhz PIII and only 256
meg ram.  My database has a little less than 350 albums.

Regards,
Music Machine


-- 
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Dan Sully]

* ModelCitizen shaped the electrons to say...


cygwin? efficient? c'mon. Surely anyone who has tried Windows ported perl
code via cygwin can easily discern that it works very badly indeed on
Windows compared to the original code on Unix/Linux?


SlimServer doesn't run using Cygwin. We use ActiveState perl on Windows, which 
is native code.

-D
--
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neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

ModelCitizen Wrote: 
> I am *still* waiting to hear back from him too (hoping that the two
> instances of slimserver.pl do not require twice as much RAM as one
> process).
The interpreter/compiler/hybrid/whatever no doubt has some RAM overhead
of it's own. But I suspect the lions share of resource consumption is
due to the actual perl code. If you strip function from one in order to
move it to the other, the ram usage of the two will be greater than when
it was monolithic, but hopefully nowhere near twice.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Michaelwagner Wrote: 
> I read in another thread recently that someone broke it out into 2
> threads fairly easily, and that solved almost all of the problem. I'm
> waiting to hear back from him what he did. But from what he described,
> the results sound plausable and the work achievable without huge
> expenditures of time and resources. Michael
This thread... and I am *still* waiting to hear back from him too
(hoping that the two instances of slimserver.pl do not require twice as
much RAM as one process).
cygwin? efficient? c'mon. Surely anyone who has tried Windows ported
perl code via cygwin can easily discern that it works very badly indeed
on Windows compared to the original code on Unix/Linux?
MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

ModelCitizen Wrote: 
> It's not solely a problem with Perl code performing badly on Windows
> machines
I saw no evidence of that. I can fire off at least 10s of requests per
second to the slim server and it handles the interrupts and replies
quickly.

> it's just that SlimServer is fundamentally flawed and needs some part of
> the core rewriting. 
I wouldn't agree with that assessement either. I would say, from past
experience with performance analysis of large pieces of code, that 99%
of it is fine. There's 1% that may need some rewriting. Finding and
identifying that 1% is often more work than the rewriting of it.

> Robin Bowes was adamant that this should include making the application
> multi-threaded. Unfortunately his suggestion was not taken up. In
> retrospect it looks like it should have been.
Again, I don't think that conclusion is supportable (at least not as
far as I have looked into it). I read in another thread recently that
someone broke it out into 2 threads fairly easily, and that solved
almost all of the problem. I'm waiting to hear back from him what he
did. But from what he described, the results sound plausable and the
work achievable without huge expenditures of time and resources.

Michael


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Triode]

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.



As this is a laptop do you have power management features enabled - if the disk spins down it will probably add several seconds to 
the responsiveness of the UI when it starts up again.


I run on a 500MHz P3 OK under linux with good performance.  I do find linux give better performance per MHz than Windows though. 
When I test using a windows box with a claimed 4 times greater performance I don't see that over the linux platform.  [in some cases 
because of the other tasks the windows box does it can be slower]


You may want to try 6.2 as it getting close to release and hence nightlies are relatively stable.  It includes quite a few updates 
over 6.1.1 including improved speed for browsing the music folder (not the specific problem you identified)  There's also a trial 
web page which tries to monitor network and server performance ["Network and Server Health" in the help section] - this can give an 
indication of performance problems and maintains a log of a few key performance metrics of the server process itself.  I'd be 
interested to see what it is showing when your server is running slow.


Adrian 


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 11:09 -0700, ModelCitizen wrote:
> Free Lunch Wrote: 
> > The performance problems are mainly due to the way the slimserver
> > software is written. Throwing hardware at the problem will not solve
> > those design issues.

I generally find that throwing hardware at most problems
solves performance. or at least makes it tolerable.

I ran SlimServer on a P3-500 box for over a year. It could
have been faster, but it worked fine. When the CPU fan died
and fried the CPU, I got a AMD 2200+ or so, and it is
more than fast enough for me.



> So it's worse than I thought then? It's not solely a problem with Perl
> code performing badly on Windows machines (which in my experience is
> always been the case), it's just that SlimServer is fundamentally
> flawed and needs some part of the core rewriting. I remember when SD
> first mentioned the proposed SlimServer "upgrade" from 5.** to 6.**
> Robin Bowes was adamant that this should include making the application
> multi-threaded. Unfortunately his suggestion was not taken up. In
> retrospect it looks like it should have been.

I'm not sure I want to jump into a discussion with such heated
terminology.

The discussion of whether the database back end or multi-threading
should be first priority got a lot of discussion. Both are big jobs.
With limited resources, one has to make decisions. The potential
for growth in functionality using the database is huge. The
re-implementation for multi-threading will only help folks who
don't get the performance they want from their hardware.

You are, of course, welcome to join [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and help with the effort.

I don't see much point in complaining about water than is over the 
dam and way downstream by now.



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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Free Lunch Wrote: 
> The performance problems are mainly due to the way the slimserver
> software is written. Throwing hardware at the problem will not solve
> those design issues.
Michaelwagner Wrote: 
> That is my impression from the code reading I've done (when I worked in
> IT I was a performance analyst).
> Clarification: in the short term, a user who does not want to become a
> developer can probably solve some problems by "overconfiguring" a
> system. In the longer term, the code needs some selective performance
> analysis, segmenting and possibly some rewriting.
So it's worse than I thought then? It's not solely a problem with Perl
code performing badly on Windows machines (which in my experience is
always been the case), it's just that SlimServer is fundamentally
flawed and needs some part of the core rewriting. I remember when SD
first mentioned the proposed SlimServer "upgrade" from 5.** to 6.**
Robin Bowes was adamant that this should include making the application
multi-threaded. Unfortunately his suggestion was not taken up. In
retrospect it looks like it should have been.
MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Free Lunch Wrote: 
> 
> The performance problems are mainly due to the way the slimserver
> software is written.  Throwing hardware at the problem will not solve
> those design issues.
That is my impression from the code reading I've done (when I worked in
IT I was a performance analyst)


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Free Lunch]

> Still, the easiest way to get performance in the PC world is with new,
> fast systems. I'd look at a SFF system for music performance.
> I don't like laptops in that environment because they tend to be
> more fragile than I like. Not that you can let a roadie throw
> any computer around like they do amps and speaker stands.
> Get one with a handle on top.

I run on an XP2200 system with 512MB of ram and 7200 RPM disks (Gentoo
Linux). The performance problems are mainly due to the way the
slimserver software is written.  Throwing hardware at the problem will
not solve those design issues.

Telling people they just need to throw more money at it is not helping anyone.


  FL
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Robin Bowes]

ModelCitizen said the following on 08/10/2005 19:25:

Unfortunately this laptop is not a high spec machine. It only has a
500ghz P3 processor and O.5gb Ram. 


You might like to check that - when I was logged in when you had CentOS 
installed the machine only appeared to have 192MB physical RAM .


R.
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If a man speaks in a forest,
and his wife's not there,
is he still wrong?

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jack Coates]

Pat Farrell wrote:...



If laptops are wanted for the display and IO, then I'd look
at big "desktop replacement" laptops, probably used from IBM
or other major vendor. Even a Centrino 1.5mHz is way fast enough
to Slimserver and a few other toys for eye candy. A grand worth of
used laptop can buy an impressive system.

 

Certainly a lot better than a Dell C610... one of those was part of the 
junk box that I just sent back to corporate a few months ago. I sent it 
back for a failed hard drive controller, might be worth asking what kind 
of disk throughput michaelwagner is seeing, especially if he's driving 
two drives.


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"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin
so across the Western ocean I must wander" -- trad.

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 20:57 -0700, Jack Coates wrote:
> Pat Farrell wrote:
> >Or a decent SFF chasis.
> >
> SFF's are nifty for the gamers because they have rocking video cards, 
> but they're bigger than a laptop, just as expensive as a laptop, lack 
> the integrated flat panel, mouse, and keyboard, and are typically 
> somewhat noisier.

Panel, mouse and keyboard part is 100% right.
They tend to be noiser because gamers like P4-3400 CPUs and
killer 6800 video cards which have to have wicked fans.

If you didn't need screaming speed, you could get it a lot quieter
than the game dudes. And in a club, who's gonna hear a little fan
noise?

> However, that improved video card could be worth a lot to a DJ... I've 
> been in a couple of clubs in Vegas where they were playing XMMS or 
> ITunes visualizations on the big projector screens :)

That doesn't take the wacko 3D gamer video, any decent card can do that,
most big projectors aren't more than 1024x...
Beside, you don't expect people to look at the videos rather than
the hot chick or guy on the floor, do you?

If laptops are wanted for the display and IO, then I'd look
at big "desktop replacement" laptops, probably used from IBM
or other major vendor. Even a Centrino 1.5mHz is way fast enough
to Slimserver and a few other toys for eye candy. A grand worth of
used laptop can buy an impressive system.

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jack Coates]

Pat Farrell wrote:


On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 18:56 -0700, Jack Coates wrote:
 


...

Sounds like you might be letting a less-important consideration 
(portability) interfere with a more important consideration (viability). 
What's wrong with a decent laptop chassis (say a T41, $500-$1000 on 
EBay) and a 100GB 7200 RPM internal drive ($300)?
   



Or a decent SFF chasis.

I'm not at all convinced that Michaelwagner has to have low spec.
The gaming dudes build SFF systems with the latest AMD or Pentiums, at
least a gig of ram, and multiple disks.

Compared to the rest of a DJ's setup (like PA speakers or turntables)
a SFF would be small and light and portable and as powerful as you want.


 

SFF's are nifty for the gamers because they have rocking video cards, 
but they're bigger than a laptop, just as expensive as a laptop, lack 
the integrated flat panel, mouse, and keyboard, and are typically 
somewhat noisier.


However, that improved video card could be worth a lot to a DJ... I've 
been in a couple of clubs in Vegas where they were playing XMMS or 
ITunes visualizations on the big projector screens :)


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so across the Western ocean I must wander" -- trad.

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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 19:27 -0700, Michaelwagner wrote:
>  Works fine with 5. Broke with "new improved better performance" 6, so I went 
> back to 5.
>  But I can't stay there forever.

Why not? I run Windows 2K on my serious Windows machine. And I'm
currently running my slimserver version 5.1 and use it every day.
It works for me, I see no reason to change. I'll probably change
once 6.2 is released, if it gets glowing reviews.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Do you need something specific in SS 6.*?

Still, the easiest way to get performance in the PC world is with new,
fast systems. I'd look at a SFF system for music performance.
I don't like laptops in that environment because they tend to be
more fragile than I like. Not that you can let a roadie throw
any computer around like they do amps and speaker stands.
Get one with a handle on top.




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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

stinkingpig Wrote: 
> Michaelwagner wrote:
> 
> >I DJ with my squeezebox, and I'm trying to build a portable system.
> Sounds like you might be letting a less-important consideration 
> (portability) interfere with a more important consideration
> (viability). 
> What's wrong with a decent laptop chassis (say a T41, $500-$1000 on 
> EBay) and a 100GB 7200 RPM internal drive ($300)?
Nothing, but if you read some of the other performance threads, that's
no guarantee that it won't experience dropouts.

In fact, at the moment, I DJ from a Dell C610 with a built-in 40GB
drive and an extra 80GB internal drive. Works fine with 5. Broke with
"new improved better performance" 6, so I went back to 5. But I can't
stay there forever.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Pat Farrell]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 18:56 -0700, Jack Coates wrote:
> Michaelwagner wrote:
> >I'm in a similar situation - I have to have low-spec hardware in order
> >to have low weight.

> Sounds like you might be letting a less-important consideration 
> (portability) interfere with a more important consideration (viability). 
> What's wrong with a decent laptop chassis (say a T41, $500-$1000 on 
> EBay) and a 100GB 7200 RPM internal drive ($300)?

Or a decent SFF chasis.

I'm not at all convinced that Michaelwagner has to have low spec.
The gaming dudes build SFF systems with the latest AMD or Pentiums, at
least a gig of ram, and multiple disks.

Compared to the rest of a DJ's setup (like PA speakers or turntables)
a SFF would be small and light and portable and as powerful as you want.


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Jack Coates]

Michaelwagner wrote:

nmizel Wrote: 
 


I also suffered from similar problems in the past with my SB1, mainly
caused by my low-power hardware (VIA Eden 533 MHz, USB 1.1 external
hard disk).
   


I DJ with my squeezebox, and I'm trying to build a portable system.
Portable means light weight hardware, small server, slow disks, etc. So
I'm in a similar situation - I have to have low-spec hardware in order
to have low weight.

Moreover, as a DJ, the sound can't stop. Like, it's not an option.
Never. So "minor annoyances" people talk about where the music stops
for only the merest second or two - those are the stuff of nightmares.


 



Sounds like you might be letting a less-important consideration 
(portability) interfere with a more important consideration (viability). 
What's wrong with a decent laptop chassis (say a T41, $500-$1000 on 
EBay) and a 100GB 7200 RPM internal drive ($300)?


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

nmizel Wrote: 
> I also suffered from similar problems in the past with my SB1, mainly
> caused by my low-power hardware (VIA Eden 533 MHz, USB 1.1 external
> hard disk).
I DJ with my squeezebox, and I'm trying to build a portable system.
Portable means light weight hardware, small server, slow disks, etc. So
I'm in a similar situation - I have to have low-spec hardware in order
to have low weight.

Moreover, as a DJ, the sound can't stop. Like, it's not an option.
Never. So "minor annoyances" people talk about where the music stops
for only the merest second or two - those are the stuff of nightmares.


> To overcome this, I managed to run two instances of slimserver.pl, one
> for the web interface (browse, search, rescan, etc.) and the other for
> the rest.
I considered doing this, but if you've already done it ... 

> I'll post more details if anyone is interested.
Totally!


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

Patrick Dixon Wrote: 
> If you want a 'universal' HD, format with FAT - but use a Linux box
> rather than an XP box to do the formating, otherwise you will be size
> restricted.
I assume you mean FAT32, not really old FAT.

And a Win98 can do it too. Or a copy of Partition Magic. But starting
at W2K, MS restrict FAT32 partitions to 40GB (or 32, can't remember).


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

radish Wrote: 
> I'm on 6.1 so it's Slim Tray and slim.exe but they're both at Normal.
Maybe they broke it in 6?

Think we could put a bug request in to put back the feature they
dropped in the move to 6? :-)


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[radish]

I'm on 6.1 so it's Slim Tray and slim.exe but they're both at Normal.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

radish Wrote: 
> Not on mine it doesn't, stock install.
How odd. I just checked. There are 2 processes running:

Slimserver
which despite the name is actually the internet explorer window and
runs at normal priority and

slim
which despite the name is actually the server, runs at high priority.

I'm currently running 5.4.0


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[radish]

Michaelwagner Wrote: 
> This was very helpful. Thanks. For a start, it showed me that, despite
> comments in the code, slim does run at high priority on windoz boxes.

Not on mine it doesn't, stock install.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[lemppari]

nmizel Wrote: 
> 
> 
> I'll post more details if anyone is interested.
> 
> Nicolas

Please do!!

Kari


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

nmizel Wrote: 
> I managed to run two instances of slimserver.pl, one for the web
> interface (browse, search, rescan, etc.) and the other for the rest.
> I'll post more details if anyone is interested.
If this is on Windows I'd be very appreciative of more details.
MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[nmizel]

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.
> 
> Thx
> 
> Thomas

Hello,

I also suffered from similar problems in the past with my SB1, mainly
caused by my low-power hardware (VIA Eden 533 MHz, USB 1.1 external
hard disk).

To overcome this, I managed to run two instances of slimserver.pl, one
for the web interface (browse, search, rescan, etc.) and the other for
the rest.

Since then, I never had any stall or drop out. I can even do a rescan
while playing flac files and doing searches on my modest hardware
without having the music being interrupted.

I'll post more details if anyone is interested.

Nicolas


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

Patrick Dixon Wrote: 
> Linux can read an NTFS disk> > > At the risk of subverting this thread I 
> submit that *nix is not that
> > good at reading NTFS disks, at least with all the distros I tried it
> > appeared to be very flaky (I was reading a USB disk via USB 1 though
> > and *nix gui.. Windows had no problem though).
> > 
> > Thanks for the bug link. Wierd that there is only me, you and Dean on
> > it though... ;-(
> > 
> > MC


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Patrick Dixon]

ModelCitizen Wrote: 
> 
> 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.Linux can read an NTFS disk, but not write to it.  So you'll need
another disk to install the OS, or try SlimCD.

If you want a 'universal' HD, format with FAT - but use a Linux box
rather than an XP box to do the formating, otherwise you will be size
restricted.

ModelCitizen Wrote: 
> 
> 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).MC
http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2018


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[ModelCitizen]

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


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Michaelwagner]

MrC Wrote: 
> Under the Processes tab, open View->Select Columns and add all the
> possible columns.  For your Performance tab, be sure to enable
> View->Show kernel times as well.
This was very helpful. Thanks. For a start, it showed me that, despite
comments in the code, slim does run at high priority on windoz boxes.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[mdw]

Hey Kevin -

I was working bug #2001 with Fred over the weekend and the fix seems to
have had the added benefit of speeding up the reponses to my Crestron
CLI polling program.  Check out last night's build (I'm on 4030) and
see if you seen any improvement (I know that it won't address the DB
issue) ...

On a related topic, I'm about to upgrade my server and wonder if you
have any strong opinions about the tradeoffs of Linux vs. Windows for
the server - I've used both and I can't decide if the added complexity
of administering Linux (I'm not an advanced user) are worth any
performance improvements.  Thoughts?

Matt


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[thomas]

Some replies mentioning multi-cpu box versus single threaded server
process... that's the box that's available, so that's what I'm using.

Interesting to note responses showing no performance problems with
similar sized libraries (10k tracks). My setup is used exclusively
through the web interface - the player hardware is never controlled
through the remote, so perhaps it is the load from the web interface
that is causing the problem? Often there are ten or more users who have
the interface open to see what's playing. There is a plain text 'now
playing' page, but people tend just to leave the full interface open.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[MrC]

[ this was also posted in the bug referenced early on page 1 of this
topic - supplimental text added here ]

It is very difficult to diagnose this type of problem without more
detailed data.  It seems like those experiencing the problems are
primarly on Windows.  Data such as which task is hogging the CPU, how
many page faults are occuring, and by which task, etc. would be
invaluable.

Without that data, I'm going to play a hunch.

I don't know if this issue has been resolve for you folks or not, but
this behaviour seems very much like something I've seen with
particularly agressive virus scanners such as Kaspersky and a couple of
others.  I might be way off base with this diagnosis in this case, but
the information below might be useful for others in the future if I've
misdiagnosed in this case.

The reports here don't seem to indicate which tasks are actually
hogging the CPU times, causing large numbers of page faults, doing
large quantities of I/O, etc.  This would be key information.  Large
VMs don't mean very much, as that's not the same as increasing
consumption of memory, which does matter (ie. leak).

Some virus scanners when set on more agressive modes perform a checksum
on each file, and store that checksum and other information in an
additional "stream" of the file.  The goal is that the virus scanner
can compare the checksum information in its database with that in the
new stream of the file more quickly than re-performing the checksum
itself (esp. for large files).  For database files that change
constantly (ie. slims music database), and tagged music files, this
agressive virus scanning performs horribly, and the system spends all
its time doing disk I/O and checksum calculations, leaving nothing for
other apps.  The result, users experience long hangs or stalls, and the
system is unusable.

Reducing the agressiveness of these scanners helps resolve the problem
with no loss of security.

For those of you who don't know how to see this information, you can
add many more very useful pieces of data to your Windows task manager. 
Under the Processes tab, open View->Select Columns and add all the
possible columns.  For your Performance tab, be sure to enable
View->Show kernel times as well.  During  the times when the system
seems wedged, watch and sort by the columns that show most activity.


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

[Dondi Fusco]

* radish shaped the electrons to say...

> >Could it be file types? I'm mainly vorbis & FLAC,
> with only a very few
> >mp3s. I know vorbis tags are supposed to be
> somewhat better designed
> >than ID3, but I don't know if they're more
> efficient to read. Also do
> >the obvious things like making sure your
> virusscanner isn't scanning
> >the music files, and that the disks are in decent
> shape re: DMA
> >settings & fragmentation.

I personally don't have an issue with my long scan
times. I have already resigned to the fact that it
takes me about 2 days to scan my library. My RAID is
defragmented on a regular basis by PerfectDisk and I
am aware of my bloated MP3s and the metadata contained
therein i.e., album review for the COMMENT, embedded
JPG album covers, and data for ALBUM ARTIST as my MCE
needs this info to discern compilation albums from
"regular" albums. I understand the process for parsing
the metadata, and as I said, I have already
surrendered the effort for efficiency. I had always
had this battle with my library and SlimServer's scan
times and had posted my "then issues" eons ago as my
library, at the time, was unusually "large". As time
goes on, everyone's "large" library will be considered
"normal".

My $.02,
-- D

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

[Dan Sully]

* radish shaped the electrons to say...


Could it be file types? I'm mainly vorbis & FLAC, with only a very few
mp3s. I know vorbis tags are supposed to be somewhat better designed
than ID3, but I don't know if they're more efficient to read. Also do
the obvious things like making sure your virusscanner isn't scanning
the music files, and that the disks are in decent shape re: DMA
settings & fragmentation.


Vorbis / FLAC tags are much more effecient to read than MP3.

-D
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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tell you what *isn't* working for me..

[radish]

Dondi Wrote: 
> --- radish
>  wrote:
> 
> > What I don't understand is why the scan time is
> > seemingly exponential.
> > I can do a full wipe and rescan of about 10,000
> > tracks in under 15
> > minutes (more like 10), so why does 7x the tracks
> > take 96x as long to
> > scan?
> 
> Radish... diff OS?? Is Linux the answer to those with
> large libraries? Haven't had the time nor the courage
> to make the leap to Linux, but if I can get a
> wipe-scan time of an hour or two as opposed to almost
> 2 days, then Im all for it. The dual-processor box I
> have is a dedicated SlimServer, so I dont mind at all
> trashing the thing to make my SB experience a bit
> slicker, but I have yet to figger out how to
> accomplish this with a large library (absolutely no
> playlists involved in the library, no FLACs; just
> MP3s). So, to the original poster, I wouldn't throw a
> mondo-amount of hardware at this project. It's only my
> opinion and from my experience, there hasn't been any
> gain in efficiency, especially if you have a "large"
> library. Just grin & bear it. The rescans are fine. 
> 
> So again, maybe we can narrow this down a bit -- what
> are people with large libraries getting for scan times
> and what OS are they using?? Maybe its the demonic
> windows that bogs the deal down??
> 
> -- Dondi

No, XP SP2 here. I actually did a test yesterday. Started an album
playing (FLAC files, transcoding to PCM on the server, wireless link to
SB2) and hit the rescan button. Took around 10 minutes, and although the
SB2's display was a little jerky when scrolling, the buffer never
dropped below 90% full. As I've posted before, this is not a super
powerful machine, but it is dedicated. Also, remember that dual proc
boxes are entirely redundant when running slimserver.

Could it be file types? I'm mainly vorbis & FLAC, with only a very few
mp3s. I know vorbis tags are supposed to be somewhat better designed
than ID3, but I don't know if they're more efficient to read. Also do
the obvious things like making sure your virusscanner isn't scanning
the music files, and that the disks are in decent shape re: DMA
settings & fragmentation.


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

[Dondi Fusco]

--- radish
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> What I don't understand is why the scan time is
> seemingly exponential.
> I can do a full wipe and rescan of about 10,000
> tracks in under 15
> minutes (more like 10), so why does 7x the tracks
> take 96x as long to
> scan?

Radish... diff OS?? Is Linux the answer to those with
large libraries? Haven't had the time nor the courage
to make the leap to Linux, but if I can get a
wipe-scan time of an hour or two as opposed to almost
2 days, then Im all for it. The dual-processor box I
have is a dedicated SlimServer, so I dont mind at all
trashing the thing to make my SB experience a bit
slicker, but I have yet to figger out how to
accomplish this with a large library (absolutely no
playlists involved in the library, no FLACs; just
MP3s). So, to the original poster, I wouldn't throw a
mondo-amount of hardware at this project. It's only my
opinion and from my experience, there hasn't been any
gain in efficiency, especially if you have a "large"
library. Just grin & bear it. The rescans are fine. 

So again, maybe we can narrow this down a bit -- what
are people with large libraries getting for scan times
and what OS are they using?? Maybe its the demonic
windows that bogs the deal down??

-- Dondi







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RE: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations? -- no, but I can tell you what *isn't* working for me..

[Matt Alioto]

Maybe a .cue/.m3u problem?
A lot of the CDs I have ripped have playlist files in the dir with the
music.  If I browse folders and play a directory containing a CD that
has a playlist file in it I get 2 of each song.  I commented out .cue
and .m3u in types.conf to remedy.(which of course broke playlists
altogether). 
BUT I'm pretty sure it dropped a 4-5 hours scan time to under a half
hour.
(40,000 tracks)
YMMV - I wasn't timing it so this may be a big wrong.  Just something to
think about.
I will test later and report.
Matt



> 
> What I don't understand is why the scan time is seemingly exponential.
> I can do a full wipe and rescan of about 10,000 tracks in under 15
> minutes (more like 10), so why does 7x the tracks take 96x as long to
> scan?
> 
> 
> --
> 
> radish
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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Mark Bennett]

One important piece of data to add:

slimserver-2005_05_30-1

Haven't bothered to update since it does what I need 99%
of the time.

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 22:46 +0100, Mark Bennett wrote:
> Intrigued by this thread I wanted to test my system to see
> what happens. First of all, I'll make no bones - it's a
> fairly high-end system, so I wasn't expecting any problems:
> 
>   Intel P4, 3.4GHz with Hyper-threading
>   1 GB 400MHZ dual-channel DDR
>   OS/home on a Western Digital 200GB PATA drive with 8MB Cache
>   Music on a Western Digital 250GB PATA drive with 8MB Cache
>   Linux (Fedora Core 2 SMP kernel)
> 
> (Don't ask how it got to be such a high-end system for
> Slimserver, it just did.)
> 
> I loaded it up with as much as I reasonably can (slimserver wise):
> 
>2 * wireless SB2's (Flac to Flac)
>1 * wireless SB1   (Flac to Wav)
>1 Softsqueeze (on server) (Flac to Flac)
>1 WinAmp (Flac to MP3)
>1 PocketPC PDA (Flac to MP3)
> 
> All players were playing different music.
> 
> With all of this going on, the SS and decoding/re-encoding were
> struggling to break 10% CPU load. No dropouts, excellent
> performance.
> 
> To load it further I did a wipe and rescan, which put the overall
> CPU performance up to effectively 100%. The only interruption from
> sound on any of the players was when they tried to move to
> the next track and couldn't find the database entry anymore.
> Restarting worked fine even during the scan. All the players and
> the web interface also remained responsive.
> 
> OK, I only have a small library (~6,500 Flac songs) but scanning
> took roughly 15 minutes for the lot.
> 
> (BTW the machine was also running a mail client which was regularly
> checking for email and Mozilla.)
> 
> Throwing hardware at the problem does help, even if it isn't
> necessary.
> 
> 
-- 
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ingenuity of complete fools." (Douglas Adams)


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Mark Bennett]

Intrigued by this thread I wanted to test my system to see
what happens. First of all, I'll make no bones - it's a
fairly high-end system, so I wasn't expecting any problems:

  Intel P4, 3.4GHz with Hyper-threading
  1 GB 400MHZ dual-channel DDR
  OS/home on a Western Digital 200GB PATA drive with 8MB Cache
  Music on a Western Digital 250GB PATA drive with 8MB Cache
  Linux (Fedora Core 2 SMP kernel)

(Don't ask how it got to be such a high-end system for
Slimserver, it just did.)

I loaded it up with as much as I reasonably can (slimserver wise):

   2 * wireless SB2's (Flac to Flac)
   1 * wireless SB1   (Flac to Wav)
   1 Softsqueeze (on server) (Flac to Flac)
   1 WinAmp (Flac to MP3)
   1 PocketPC PDA (Flac to MP3)

All players were playing different music.

With all of this going on, the SS and decoding/re-encoding were
struggling to break 10% CPU load. No dropouts, excellent
performance.

To load it further I did a wipe and rescan, which put the overall
CPU performance up to effectively 100%. The only interruption from
sound on any of the players was when they tried to move to
the next track and couldn't find the database entry anymore.
Restarting worked fine even during the scan. All the players and
the web interface also remained responsive.

OK, I only have a small library (~6,500 Flac songs) but scanning
took roughly 15 minutes for the lot.

(BTW the machine was also running a mail client which was regularly
checking for email and Mozilla.)

Throwing hardware at the problem does help, even if it isn't
necessary.


-- 
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was completely foolproof, was, that people tended to underestimate the 
ingenuity of complete fools." (Douglas Adams)


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

[radish]

> I have a dual 500MHz Dell
> Precision workstaion with 2Gb RAM and a 640Gb MicroNet
> RAID-5 connected via firewire 800 that stores my
> >70,000 tunes on WinXP SP2. I have been a SlimDevices
> customer since around v3 of the slim server software. 
> 
> An initial scan of the library takes over a day.
> Always has. You just need to sacrifice a day and half
> for the initial scan with large libraries IMO

What I don't understand is why the scan time is seemingly exponential.
I can do a full wipe and rescan of about 10,000 tracks in under 15
minutes (more like 10), so why does 7x the tracks take 96x as long to
scan?


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Re: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Stewart Loving-Gibbard]

Ah, good to know -- thank you for responding!

I have an Adaptec RAID card that came bundled with my new machine, I was 
concerned it would be too slow for the purpose. Your library is just a 
little smaller than mine, and your specs very close to what I was 
intending. I'd be tickled if I had similar smooth sailing.


Stew

tgoldstone wrote:

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...





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RE: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Marshall Clow]

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.
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It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
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RE: [slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[Craig, James (IT)]

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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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[radish]

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


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[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...


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[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.


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[slim] Re: Best Performance - recommendations?

[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.


-- 
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