Easy way to speed up Fanart browsing

[rwc]

I've been using fancycache and really liking it...but as I was thinking about caching I started to wonder how hybrid drives, fancycache, and superfetch varies...

How do you think the following 3 things compare:

SATA hard drive+fancycache
SATA hard drive+a very big superfetch
SATA hybrid hard drive


I'm guessing that the hybrid drive would win mostly because of increased performance on the write side. But from a 'read' point of view would come out close to the same.

I have no idea how superfetch would compare to fancycache...unless their algorithms were drastically different, I would assume they'd be about the same

[Tomahawk51]

Fuzzy: Thanks for FancyCache advocacy. Perhaps the Ramdisk approach is a good one, but for me simplicity is a winner.

I have an SSD, installed FancyCache for my full SageTV drive, and I *think* it is helping. I especially love the fact that my non-recognized RAM is being used (32bit bound due to FireWire channel changing).

Question: I am using Read only mode. I gave it 756mb for L1, and all "Intelligent Memory" ~2.5gb. My main intention is to effectively use that L2.
Does my configuration make sense, or is it somehow a poor choice (e.g. L1 too low?).

[Fuzzy]

Kinda depends on what you are trying to speed up. By 'SageTV drive' are you referring to the drive where sagetv resides, or where your recordings are? Ideally, best benefits would be where the sagetv folder resides - however, since it a volume level cache, running it on the recording drive has the potential to wipe a lot of the fanart out whenever a lot of recordings are in progress (even with LFU algoritm selected, it still passes data through the cache unnecessarily). If your sagetv drive is different that your recording drive, then this should work perfectly fine - you will get best performance limiting the caching to those areas that are used for repeated use (sagetv's fanart folder, and the userdata/cache area).

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by rwc

I've been using fancycache and really liking it...but as I was thinking about caching I started to wonder how hybrid drives, fancycache, and superfetch varies...

How do you think the following 3 things compare:

SATA hard drive+fancycache
SATA hard drive+a very big superfetch
SATA hybrid hard drive


I'm guessing that the hybrid drive would win mostly because of increased performance on the write side. But from a 'read' point of view would come out close to the same.

I have no idea how superfetch would compare to fancycache...unless their algorithms were drastically different, I would assume they'd be about the same

In most cases, the fancy cache is going to be faster than the hybrid drive. hybrid drives are basically a regular hard drive, with an SSD as a cache - so access of cached material is still going to be limited by the speed of the SSD and the SATA pipe - fancycache, on the other hand, is in system RAM, which is accessed MUCH faster. For non-cached data, both would be the same.

As for a large superfetch (which in theory, is dependent on just how much free memory you have on your system) - it depends on the system. There is only one superfetch on a given system, and as such, it is then used for all drives - with limited per-drive configuration. Allocating memory to fancycache, however, allows you to dedicate and tweak a certain chunk of RAM for a certain drive. So in a typical sage server, you'd be able to cache the drive that has the sagetv install and supporting data, but not bother caching the write once - read once later scheme of the recording drives.

That said, I do run a small write-through cache on my recording drives, but this is more to improve live comskip performance.

[Tomahawk51]

Thanks for the guidance. I should have been more clear, but your answer speaks to my question. I do have a dedicated OS drive (SSD) that hosts SageTV.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

you will get best performance limiting the caching to those areas that are used for repeated use (sagetv's fanart folder, and the userdata/cache area).

I'll be looking at this when back from work more, but a question:

Is it possible to restrict FancyCache to ONLY cache specific folders?

If Yes, I missed that completely. It's simply caching my C: drive now, and I'd like to see if it would improve life to scope it to Fanart or even SageTV's folder.

[rwc]

As far as I know, it's only to the c drive, and not a specific folder. To "combat" this, I just keep the cache high--figuring i'll get some of the folders from c:\ and the majority from the fan art...it's not efficient, but it works well.

I guess as a work around, you could partition off a directory just for fan art and run fancy cache on that partition.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by rwc

As far as I know, it's only to the c drive, and not a specific folder. To "combat" this, I just keep the cache high--figuring i'll get some of the folders from c:\ and the majority from the fan art...it's not efficient, but it works well.

I guess as a work around, you could partition off a directory just for fan art and run fancy cache on that partition.

Correct, FancyCache does whole volume caching - however, on a system drive, it works very well when run in LFU mode (LFU is Least Frequently Used, meaning that's how it decides what to purge from the cache). This keeps files that are used most frequently in RAM (like the fanart cache folder). Will you see massive improvements over the basic SSD running fancycache on it? Not sure - SSDs already are quite fast for random small file access - but RAM is still faster.