Database speed

[ahagele]

Is it worth changing database for gmusicbrowser? I'm running a large collection on an oldish laptop and it works, but is a bit slow at startup and search. Current database is something like mysql or whatever comes with a default Mint installation.
I just wonder if it's likely to gain noticeable speed improvement or will it be a waste of effort.

Thanks. A

[Quentin Sculo]

Sorry for not replying sooner, I was mostly offline for 2 weeks.

You can't change database with gmb, it only uses an internal database.
How many songs do you have ? The startup is a bit slow, but the search is rather fast. Have you changed the fields that are searched (click on the left-hand icon of the search entry), of course the more fields you have selected the slower it will get.

[ahagele]

I have over 100k items in the database. The search is fine even when using all possible search fields.
It's the first time lookup after power up (which is always standby in my case).
I might have been able to pinpoint it a bit more. It seems to be the disk access. I'm using an external USB HDD and that is on standby until accessed.
So the first use of HDD from GMB is slow because the disk needs to spin up etc. So I guess on a always on HDD I would not have this issue.

[Quentin Sculo]

All the data used when searching is in memory, which might include the swap. So either some of the used memory has been put in the swap, or maybe it's the loading some album covers that makes it access the disk.

[ahagele]

Must be the loading of artwork or some other resources.
The mem usage is about 350MB (out of 2GB), so not much swapping.
Subsequent searches are much faster. So it looks like a disk access is needed at startup to show some album cover and then the spin up time of the USB HDD is quite long.
now that I sort of know what goes on it's easy to adapt to it.
Thanks for you help.

[Quentin Sculo]

Well if you have lots of memory and the disk is woken up for artworks, you could try increasing the picture cache size in the misc options. I'm not sure it will really help, as it probably won't hold all the thumbnails, and the cache is size-specific so if gmb needs a higher size it will have to read the disk anyway.

[ahagele]

thanks, I'll give it a try.

Sorry for changing topic, but just wanted to know how the state is with playlists? Last I looked it appeared the standard m3u playlists are not that easy to create and use in GMB. Is that still the case?
Or should I start a new thread here with that kind of questions?

[Quentin Sculo]

I haven't changed anything on saved lists recently. There's a number of things I want to improve, like ability to export to m3u from the saved-list context menu, option to save (and keep updated) lists to m3u instead of in the gmbrc file, and the whole saved filters/lists panel needs improvements (but that will need to wait for the filterpane redesign with the new sidepanel widget).
So, I don't know what you need it to do, using a layout with a TabbedLists widget is strongly recommended if you want to use saved-lists a lot.
Note that I recommend using labels when possible (ie when you don't care about the song order), even though you can't currently add a label via drag-and-drop.
If you want to discuss this further, a new thread would be better.