New user's registration have been closed due to high spamming and low trafic on this forum. Please contact forum admins directly if you need an account. Thanks !

Slimserver performance with 128Mb RAM

How are you using your Bubba? Got ideas for a cool modification? Share!
Locked
tonyc
Posts: 1
Joined: 11 Oct 2007, 06:25

Slimserver performance with 128Mb RAM

Post by tonyc »

It's been reported that although slimserver happily runs on bubba it can be a bit slow, I think these reports related to the 64Mb bubbas. Has anyone had any experience of slimserver and 128Mb Ram?

A friend of mine with a very large music collection has asked me for a NAS etc recommendation but I'm hesitating to point him to bubba because of possible performance issues (I've only got a 64Mb bubba to test).

Ta
Pressurized
Posts: 53
Joined: 11 Jun 2007, 17:12
Location: East of England

Post by Pressurized »

Performance through the web interface on my laptop is slow.

When using the Squeezebox's remote control, performance is fine.
juicer
Posts: 23
Joined: 23 Jan 2007, 10:16

Post by juicer »

It would definitely be a nice sales pitch for a memory upgrade if Excito could show some statistics on how much faster slimserver performs on a bubba with 128 MB compared to 64 MB... :)

/juicer
amorphia
Posts: 5
Joined: 28 Dec 2007, 16:02

Post by amorphia »

Bump!

OK, this topic was almost at the top anyway, but I just wanted to say I would also be really interested in this. I really like the look of the Bubba but my number 1 application would be Slimserver and I have a biiiiiiiiiig library.

Kul förrestan att Bubba är en svensk grej!

Cheers,

Ben
Kramer
Posts: 24
Joined: 23 Oct 2007, 17:38

Hi

Post by Kramer »

According to the product page the version that excito are shipping now have 128 MB internal RAM
http://excito.com/products.html
lars_p_fink
Posts: 5
Joined: 07 Jan 2008, 02:17

Post by lars_p_fink »

Pressurized wrote:Performance through the web interface on my laptop is slow.

When using the Squeezebox's remote control, performance is fine.
Hi, Pressurized.

Since, no hard figures has been published, could you please elaborate your experience?

What kind of delays, if any, are you experiencing when browsing, selecting a tune for playback etc.

Best regards,
Lars
GaryL
Posts: 87
Joined: 04 Sep 2007, 17:40
Location: Northern Ireland

Post by GaryL »

Just seen the Squeezebox from Slim Devices called Duet:

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_duet.html
Image

Does anyone have this running with Bubba, any comments on performance etc..
Pressurized
Posts: 53
Joined: 11 Jun 2007, 17:12
Location: East of England

Post by Pressurized »

This Duet looks good. Essentially it seems to move the display of the current Squeezebox to the remote, greatly enhancing it in the meantime and adds features like ability to control multiple 'receivers'.

I would love this, I could put my Squeezebox upstairs and have this in the living room. However, the requirements are:
  • - SqueezeCenterâ„¢ 7.0
    - All systems: 256MB RAM and 80MB hard disk space
    - Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later
    - Windows: 733Mhz Pentium running Window 2000/XP/Vista
    - Linux/BSD/Solaris/Other (Perl 5.8.3 or later)
    - Ethernet and/or 802.11b/g wireless home network
    - Broadband Internet connection required for Internet radio and music services

SqueezeCenter seems to be a new version of SlimServer and, given that it needs 256MB RAM, the bubba may not be able to cope... I haven't been able to find anything in their blurb about SqueezeCenter.

It is definitely worth checking out, though.
Pressurized
Posts: 53
Joined: 11 Jun 2007, 17:12
Location: East of England

Performance Tests

Post by Pressurized »

Here are some performance tests:


Hardware

Bubba, 128MB, 320GB HDD
Network is 'g', SlimServer is running on bubba delivering the web interface to a wireless, reasonably specced laptop running Firefox. Bubba will be the bottleneck, I think.


Library Statistics

Music library contains 655 albums with 8785 songs by 888 artists, virtually all mp3

Size: 38.0 GB (40,853,755,948 bytes)

A library clear and full rescan took just over 9 hours. However, during this time, bubba was also doing 3 hours of wired backup transfer to a Linux PC via Samba (19.5GB) and 2.5 hours of rsyncing the music library to the same Linux PC (14.7GB). Bubba's performance doing the rescan alone would have been significantly faster.

(I think I am right in how I timed the rescan - I looked at the time taken to write the file /var/cache/slimserver/.slimserversql.db)

Following addition of a 14 track album (89.1MB) a scan for new music found it in 43 minutes, the scan was completed in about 50 minutes. The time at which the files were found corresponds closely to their alphabetical positions in the music directory. This could be confirmed more accurately with a couple more tests.


With Squeezebox off

Browsing

With 50 items per web page:
After clicking 'Browse Albums', the list of the first albums took 77 seconds to be displayed.
Clicking a letter caused a further 48.

With 100 items:
Browse albums: 101 seconds
Another letter: 90 seconds

With 900 items (enough to capture all albums): 300 secs (5 min)

Opening an album: 13 seconds typical, 220 seconds for an 'album' containing 440 songs


Searching

Simple search for the word 'love':
4m 50s, 504 matches, all appeared at once

For the word 'gibberish':
couple of seconds, no matches

For the word 'the':
aborted after 5 minutes

For the phrase 'White Rabbit'
53s, 1 match

Advanced search, artist = 'police'
18s, 20 matches

Track = 'White Rabbit'
7s, 1 match


Tests on Squeezebox itself via remote with SlimServer not showing web interface:

Browsing doesn't work in a time-able way - tracks appear very quickly but have to be paged through.

Searching
Again, very quick
3 seconds to find 'white rabbit'


Some tentative conclusions:

The web interface is slow but easy to use. Probably too slow for general use but improves as your searches become more specific.

The remote control interface with the Squeezebox is adequately quick.

If anybody wants me to do some more tests, let me know and I'll try to oblige.


One particular way forward may be to install SlimServer on my laptop and scan the music library on bubba. The scan would, I guess, take a similar time to bubba's own but, after that, the music database would be on the laptop and accessing it ought to be fast. When songs are selected, bubba would be fast enough to stream them no bother.

One issue here is that there would be two servers interacting with bubba. I would still like to keep the option to use Squeezebox with the laptop off and SlimServer running on bubba but I would like to be able to take over the Squeezebox with the laptop reasonably bumplessly.

Has anyone done this? If not or there are no tips, I'll try this shortly.
lars_p_fink
Posts: 5
Joined: 07 Jan 2008, 02:17

Post by lars_p_fink »

Thanks Pressurized,

l was mostly interested in browsing with remote, since I rescan seldom and don't use web-ui often.

Thanks again
Lars
lars_p_fink
Posts: 5
Joined: 07 Jan 2008, 02:17

Post by lars_p_fink »

Hi again,

I know it is hard to give actual figures for this, but if you could try two more things for me I'd be more than grateful.

Just as background information I currently have my Slimserver running on a NLSLU2 (http://nslu2-linux.org), which only has 32MB of memory.

If anyone with a bubba (64MB or 128MB) also has had Slimserver running on a NSLU2 and can make a comparision of the experience that would great!

1. When I use the remote to browse, for instance Artists, there is a noticeable delay (more than one second) before the first artist appears. How is that on the 128MB Bubba?

Then using up or down arrows the artist appear as fast as I can press the buttons.

2. If I select a tune, then press right button to see the tags, and go to for instance Genre and press right again to get all in that genre there is a delay again.
How is on the 128MB Bubba?

I tried these two test on my friends squeezebox, which had the server running on a more powerful machine and there where no delays what so ever.

Best regards,
Lars
Pressurized
Posts: 53
Joined: 11 Jun 2007, 17:12
Location: East of England

Post by Pressurized »

1) A delay of 2-3 seconds, once there you can move through artists as fast as you say.

2) Momentary delay; less than a second

Best Regards

Adrian
CJNE
Posts: 14
Joined: 29 Feb 2008, 04:11

Post by CJNE »

Has anyone tried on-the-fly conversion of flac -> mp3 (streaming) ?
Locked