Artist Cache

[BBCritical]

Does the sage software read from a cache of artists in the music section?

[Opus4]

I'm not sure how to answer that (or even if I have an answer) because I'm not sure what you are asking.

What is happening, or what is it you want to happen?

- Andy

[BBCritical]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I'm not sure how to answer that (or even if I have an answer) because I'm not sure what you are asking.

What is happening, or what is it you want to happen?

- Andy

Let me try this again. When sage loads does it take the music data (songs, artists, genres, etc) and create a cache to hold those values so that when you access the artists through the GUI and scrolll from screen to screen the data has already been accumulated or does it gather this invormation ont the fly?

[Opus4]

The music info is loaded when you go to the music browser for the first time, which is why there can be a delay when accessing the screen for the first time. Other info is loaded as needed, so as you scroll, for example, the thumbnails are loaded as they need to be displayed.

I don't know about the internal level of caching in the core after that... so perhaps as you use other parts of SageTV, maybe the older cached music info is dumped to make room for the parts of the UI that are currently being used.

- Andy

[BBCritical]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The music info is loaded when you go to the music browser for the first time, which is why there can be a delay when accessing the screen for the first time. Other info is loaded as needed, so as you scroll, for example, the thumbnails are loaded as they need to be displayed.

I don't know about the internal level of caching in the core after that... so perhaps as you use other parts of SageTV, maybe the older cached music info is dumped to make room for the parts of the UI that are currently being used.

- Andy

That is the answer I was looking for. So in essence everything to access music is done on the fly. This is causing extremely sluggish performance for my collection which is > 500 Gb of music files. Are there any plans in the future to cache the data in an xml file or something else along those lines?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by BBCritical

That is the answer I was looking for. So in essence everything to access music is done on the fly.

I don't think that is what I said, and is why I was asking for more details of what you meant before I commented. More details...

This is causing extremely sluggish performance for my collection which is > 500 Gb of music files. Are there any plans in the future to cache the data in an xml file or something else along those lines?

The music info that SageTV reads from the tags when the music is imported is already stored in wiz.bin, so it is cached in its own data file, not parsed from the music files every time it needs to be loaded. When you go to the music browser, all that info has to be loaded into memory & that will have to be done no matter where the info is stored on your system. It looks like you have an extremely large music collection, though I don't know the file count, so I don't believe there is any way to get instant access to all of the info w/o loading what is needed into memory at some point.

If there are portions in the core that could be improved in terms of its internal caching for large databases, you would have to contact SageTV for feedback on possible improvements in that area.

- Andy

[BBCritical]

The system usually starts to choke around 20,000 tags in my case. I love SageTV but I sure wish they would further improve the speed of the music and pictures.... I will now step down

[Opus4]

I don't know if this affects you, but using large thumbnails can slow things down, as those larger images take longer to load.

Like I said above, though: talk to SageTV directly. If there are things they can optimize for large collections, maybe they could try some things out with you... but I can't promise how much can be optimized for large collections due to the simple fact of transferring all that data..

- Andy

[lovingHDTV]

Yes for the rest of us with large collections please talk with Sage

[BBCritical]

Are there any indexes used during the manipulation of the music data so that listing of artists, tracks, etc moves faster?

[Opus4]

I merged the question with the one you asked previously, which seems similar. I'm not sure what the difference is of what you are asking this time.

As I mentioned above, SageTV caches the music data in wiz.bin & loads it into memory when you access the music library. Such a large collection as you have will end up being slower than a small collection, simply because of how much data has to be accessed for so many songs.

Have you contacted SageTV? Maybe there could be something done differently to help with such a large number of music files.

And, as mentioned above: how large are your thumbnails? Larger thumbs take longer to load and use more memory.

- Andy

[BBCritical]

Is it possible to have the music section only not display thumbnails? That way I can see if removal of the thumbnails improves the sluggish behavior...

[nielm]

All MP3 metadata is held in Sages DB, and is only read from the MP3 files when they are first added to sages DB. In addition, this is actually a memoryDB held in the local memory of the server and in each SageClient, there should be no delay in accessing the data for each music track.

What can cause delays as Opus has mentioned, is the sorting and grouping of all music when you first enter the music lib, but you will see a 'loading...' while this is occurring...

The delay in scrolling is most likely due to thumbnail loading, especially if your folder.jpgs are large...

If you want you can use studio to turn off thumbnails, and then you can see the difference in scrolling speed -- it really makes a remarkable difference.
(for Music album view, search for 'Album List Item', expand it, expand the 'AlbumArt' child, and replace the If 'HasAlbumArt(CurAlbum)' with 'false && HasAlbumArt(CurAlbum)')

(edit: I actually wrote this before your response BBCritical )

[BBCritical]

Are they loaded into the sagedb local memory on the clients when they are added to the db or when the client calls for the data from the server for the first time? Just trying to understand how the system works... Also if Im only looking at this data in the client do I make the change in studio on the client only or in both the client and the server?

Tnanks.....

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by BBCritical

Is it possible to have the music section only not display thumbnails? That way I can see if removal of the thumbnails improves the sluggish behavior...

You can try what Niel suggested for removing the thumbs, or send me a PM as a reminder for me to set up some testing.

BTW: what size are your thumbs? I know other people got better performance, especially on a client, by reducing the thumb sizes. Large thumbs will take longer to transfer over the network & to load/resize in memory for subsequent display.

Originally Posted by BBCritical

Are they loaded into the sagedb local memory on the clients when they are added to the db or when the client calls for the data from the server for the first time? Just trying to understand how the system works...

When the client needs to display the data (first time you access the music browser), it has to process the data into various grouping types & set up the display. The initial browser menu load time delay mentioned by Niel comes from setting up the display and then grouping & sorting the data for the various views. The initial browser view's data is processed first, then all the other views are processed in the background after the browser loads. That way, switching from one view to another is faster than having to load the view's data fresh every time you switch to it.

Also if Im only looking at this data in the client do I make the change in studio on the client only or in both the client and the server?

If you want to try STV changes, you just have to do it on the STV currently being used. So just change the client to test the thumb display changes, since the server UI doesn't affect the client's UI display.

Thumbnail display during scrolling should already be partially optimized by delaying loading & displaying the thumb so they aren't all loaded/shown shown every single time you scroll down. there may be some additional optimizations needed for this, though.

Are you using 3D Acceleration in SageTV and have DirectX 9 installed? If not, try it with 3D Accell enabled in Detailed Setup.

- Andy

[Eckwell]

Andy,

How do I change the default size of thumbnails that are generated when I set up the music folder?

THanks.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Eckwell

How do I change the default size of thumbnails that are generated when I set up the music folder?

SageTV just uses the album art it finds in your music collection. If you want those images to be smaller, you would have to resize them & then probably do a reimport of your music.

- Andy

[Eckwell]

What about the settings in properties:


ui/thumbnail_height and ui/thumbnail_width

the user guide says these are used when generating the thumbnails. Will this only be used if there is no image already in the music files, or tags?

EDIT: I have not actually imported all teh music yet... I did it once during my many test builds... waiting to make sure I get it right!

[Opus4]

Music thumbs aren't generated... only videos have something (video frames) to generate a thumb from. Music files w/o existing thumb images are just audio. You have to provide the album art, but a lot of CD rippers will do that automatically as they download the song info.

- Andy

[Eckwell]

that's right... Mr. idiot here... thanks.