Performance issues (loading up a large collection of music)

[Moe]

Well now that I have netremote up and running after my problems (See http://www.netremote.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=384&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) I now have an issue with performance.

You may want to read the last page of the above thread if what I am about to say confuses you. :)

My hardware: MC is running on an XP pro box, P4 2.4. Netremote is running on a Win98 Fujitsu Point 1600 tablet Pentium 166.

Here is what is happening. At first I had about 5,000 songs in media center and although the "Playing Now" field would populate itself it was taking FOREVER to finish. Out of curiousity I ran netremote on the XP box and let it sit for awhile and if eventually finished populating the "Playing Now" field, once it was populated everything was working great.

So what I did was remove most of the songs in MC and got it down to about 700. Once I did that, I fired up NR on the tablet and after a 5-10 minute wait those 700 songs populated the "Playing Now" field and I could control MC via the tablet perfectly. The problem is if I decide I want to listen to a full album of stuff and then go back to "play all music" (which is what i will be doing most of the time, I want a really big random jukebox) the "Playing Now" field has to repopulate itself. Now if 700 songs is taking 5-10 minutes I have no Idea how long my full collection will take (I have about 100 gigs worth of mp3s, about 1,100 CDs or so).

So is there a workaround to this? Is there anyway to keep a database or something that netremote can store and quickly load up?

Hopefully I have explained this clearly. If anyone has a large collection of music can you comment on your loading times if you select to play all your music? If I am going to have to wait several hours each time I boot up I don't think NR is going to work out for me.

[Mastiff]

Hi, Moe! Most of the other stuff in your other thread went way over my head. I'm a power user when it comes to a lot of stuff, but I don't know much about communication protocols, services and event viewers. But this one I can tell you: I have no problems with my library, and it's now well above 30 000 tracks. So there's definitively something wrong there that's not directly connected to the library size! If you try to open the library with a regular browser (through Internet Explorer), is it just as slow? If not, I'm scratching my head even more. Do you have the latest MC version? If it's 9.0 you need 9.0.180, if you use 9.1 you need to be as close to 9.1.251 as possible. Report back on these things, and we'll try to take it from there.

[mhwlng]

Hello,

just F.Y.I I have exactly the same speed problem. (MC 9.1.251, NR 0.99, mc_800x600_2.ccf, total collection 11000 tracks)

I am using an 'aquapad' with XP embedded on it and 800x600 resolution

If I have a 'playing now' list of more than a few 100 tracks, Everything becomes extremely slow (looks like it crashed).

If I modify the ccf file to remove the 'MJB list control' everyhting loads ok and I can select/play albums fine.
But In the album list there is one 'unassigned' (i.e. no album name known) with about 900 tracks. If I select that one (to play) NR hangs again.

Regards,

Marcel

[Mastiff]

The playing now list will slow things down since it is refreshed every time you connect to the host. So that's not so strange. But the size of the rest of the library shouldn't matter except for when you're actually looking through it. And then you should be able to work quite easily as long as it's splitted sensibly. My Artist/Album view is splitted in 1 character groups - one for A, one for B and so on, since a full Artist/album view takes about two minutes to download. Maybe this is related to the cover browsing of the library, not to the regular library browsing method?

[mhwlng]

Hello Mastiff,

I only have subdirectories per artist (a few 100) the MC Views are the default settings. I only added an 'Album' view as described in a message on this forum.

but when NR is first loaded, The tree is initially collapsed (i.e. it only shows the 3 main items) .

if my 'playing now' list is more than a few 100 tracks, the play/next/etc. navigation buttons don't work even if the tree is collapsed. only removing the tree from the ccf file fixes that. navigating through the albums (on the other screens in the ccf ) works ok (exept trying to play the 'album' with 900 tracks as mentioned in my previous message)

I almost always have my 11000 tracks plyaing in random play.

if I expand the playing now part of the tree, slowly all the tracks are added to the list. if I expand any other node, then I just see 'loading....' and nothing seems to happen...

also you mention :

>>My Artist/Album view is splitted in 1 character groups - one for A, one >>for B and so on

I am not sure what you mean, Have you changed the standard artist/album view in MC ? How did you configure your views for NR ?

Marcel

[Mastiff]

You add another Artist column and right click it. Then you choose properties and choose to add a grouping level (1 if you have no genres or other kinds of info splitting the stuff). That might help. And another thing: To be able to browse the library in MC 9.1 at all you need to right click the view scheme, choose "Edit view cheme" and cross "Populate tree" under behaviour. If not, you can't browse it.

[Moe]

Thanks guys.

I am using MC 9.0.180, everything works fine if I use the web browser (in IE). I have to get ready for work right now so I can report some more tonight.

Mastiff, do you ever do a "play all" of all of your music? So that NR would have to load up all of your songs? If not could you try it and tell us how your performance is?

mhwlng, I am glad to see I am not alone here, hopefully we can both find a solution to our problem.

Anyway, I will play with it a little more tonight when I get back from work.

[Mastiff]

What happens is the same experience that I wuuld have if it had been possible to run Windows XP on a 80286... But when I choose to play all, both MC9.1 and NetRemote's panel stops dead. On NetRemote I can only see "Loading" on anything I try. I can walk through other things, but not access the library or control MC at all. Then, about half a minute later, MC finally starts playing. The media library is again accessable from NetRemote. But expanding Playing now takes forever, of course. And feedback does not work when I have done that.

[mhwlng]

In mc_800x600_2.ccf

lf I go to the tree and select
media library\audio\album\unassigned, then right click and select 'play' then 978 tracks are entered within a few seconds to the 'playing now' list. and performance is OK.

If I go to media library\audio\artists(grouped)\C then right click and select 'play' this also works fine (745 tracks entered into 'playing now' in about 5 seconds)


If I go to the album list (vertical or horizonal) and click on the first entry which represents the unassigned ones (i.e. the same 978 tracks), everything locks up while tracks are added very slowly and I need to restart NR and MC

(P.S. right clicking in a tree is not so easy on a touch screen in windows, this makes the tree not so useful without a mouse)


If the 'playing now' contains 3084 tracks, after starting netremote, it takes about 1 minute before it is reponsive to play/next previous etc...


Regards,

Marcel

[Mastiff]

OK, I'm retreating while I still have some honor left. This is beyond me. I hope somebody else knows what it may be. Sorry.

[Moe]

mhwlng, what is the speed of your "aquapad"?

[Moe]

What happens is the same experience that I wuuld have if it had been possible to run Windows XP on a 80286... But when I choose to play all, both MC9.1 and NetRemote's panel stops dead. On NetRemote I can only see "Loading" on anything I try. I can walk through other things, but not access the library or control MC at all. Then, about half a minute later, MC finally starts playing. The media library is again accessable from NetRemote. But expanding Playing now takes forever, of course. And feedback does not work when I have done that.

Well Mastiff it sounds like you have the same problem that myself and mhwlng have, it just sounds like it is not a problem for you. From the sounds of it both mhwlng and myself will primarily be playing all of our music in a big random shuffle, which seems like something that you don't do so it is not a problem for you. Is that a correct assumption?

By the way, what is a 80286?

[mhwlng]

Mine has a 500 Mhz transmeta processor, has 2 cf -slots and has 128Mb RAM

you can run many os's on it :

linux, windows ce, various flavours of windows.

I am currently running xp embedded on a 1Gb compact flash microdrive....

this is what it looks like :


http://piazza.iae.nl/users/mhwlng/remote.jpg (300Kb)


Marcel

[Mastiff]

Moe, let me guess: You're a pretty young thing, huh? :wink: 80286 was a processor from Intel around 1990 or so, the one before the 386, after the 8086.

And I never have more than an album's worth of tracks in Playing now. Often I select track by track. With my music, my wife's music and the kids' stuff random play would kill somebodyhere! I want total control over each playing track. If I should lust for random one day (which is extremely unlikely) I would turn on the radio. 8)

[Moe]

I am not that young, 29, and I kinda figured it was an older computer, I just wasn't familiar with that one.

So you do have the same problem, it is just not a problem for you because you don't do random play.

Turning the radio on would be more like putting on a 20 song shuffle (with only one or two good songs) and then throw in 100 ads into the mix, no thanks. When all the music is yours and you don't have to put up with anyone else random play is fantastic, nothing like hearing a Pantera followed by Billie Holiday and then Esquivel. :)

[sapnho]

I am not that young, 29

Moe, don't worry about your age, it's just that in Mastiff's youth (and in mine probably as well...) a 286 was a hell of a machine... :P :lol: :wink:

[Mastiff]

Hey, I dreamed about an 8 meg harddisk for my 8086 instead of the two 720 kb floppy stations, but back then it would have set me back around 1000 dollars! :wink:

As for the radio stations I listen to, they're not commercial. Commercial radio isn't very big here in Norway, so the rotation of the latest hit from Beyonce and J. Lo isn't that bad. If you want contrast, how about Dimmu Borgier (norwegian extreme black metal) and Richie Blackmore's Night (modernized middle age music)! :D

But I would have to say that unless you get a 1000 mbit network on your handheld, picking up so many tracks from playing now (or any place where so many tracks have to be loaded at the same time) will take time.

[Ben S]

What would be the best solution for you guys, having it only show the first 100 songs or something? I think Mastiff is right that having 1000+ tracks will take some time over the wire. The majority of the time is actually spent -rendering- it (if you can believe that).

I'll try to get better performance, I'm just trying to think of other solutions if needed.

[Ben S]

Marcel - How is the performance on the Aquapad with everything -other- than loading playing now with 1000+ tracks? I see one on ebay for ~$300 USD, and I'm wondering if I should keep an eye out for one in the future.

[Moe]

Wicked, if you could make it so that it only loads up the first 100 songs or so that would be FANTASTIC!! I really have no need to see all the songs, if it only showed 25 songs that would probably be plenty for me. I would actually prefer this to having the whole list load.

[mhwlng]

WickedEwok,

I have an older model (500Mhz,128Mb RAM) I believe that there are faster models around with more memory.

The performance is reasonable, but don't expect pentium speeds !!
I wouldn't want to run microsoft office on it :-)

Starting up XP takes a while (a microdrive is not super fast, and 128Mb RAM is not a lot, but once netremote is started, I don't see the performance difference with my fast pentium machine. ) ,

but of course you could install WINCE on 32Mb compact flash, this loads instantly. or you could install windows 95 (on microdrive)

Marcel

[Ben S]

Moe and others - I'll take a look. I added my whole collection and also noticed the performance lag. I'll make this a toggle in the config as to whether you want to limit the number of tracks in playing now.

Thanks!

[Mastiff]

Is there nothing you can't do? :wink:

[Ben S]

Many things, yes. I can do a lot on the programming side, it just all takes -time- unfortunately. If I could think it and have it magically appear, NetRemote would be running a lot better. :)

[Moe]

WickedEwok, I was just wondering if you made any progress for a solution to this problem? Did you figure out a way to just have it load the firs 100 or so songs?

Thanks,
Moe

[Ben S]

Not yet. The next beta release (0.94) will have this fix in though. Thanks!