Well again I post with very cautious optimism: I cherry picked advice from many of those above links and discovered that query caching WAS enabled but query_cache_size was set to 0. So I vi'ed /etc/my.cnf and added
Code:
query_cache_size = 16777216
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=2097152
One of the links claim that allocating 8mb to MySQL would be overkill for xbmc and I doubled it, but I have 3gb in my nas and I've never seen the memory usage go above 29%, so I figured why not. I couldn't figure out how to restart the MySQL server so I just reset my NAS. I opened up xbmc and ran a manual Library update and was not surprised to witness a ~30 second "freeze" of xbmc. So I started digging as if back to the drawing board but a short while later, as I had some time to kill, just ran another manual library update for poops and giggles...and this time NO "FREEZE"! I didn't believe my eyes so I ran another when it was finished and again no "freeze". Then I turned on debugging, shutdown xbmc, reopened it and ran a manual update and still no "freeze"!
Here's that debug log in case anyone cares: pastebin.com/VdDGYVBm
My very uneducated guess would be that the first time i tried the update it hadn't cached whatever queries it needed and then had those cached queries to access for the second through fourth attempts.
Thanks so much for all your help, (especially @Kibje and @Dilligaf) i'll be re-marking everything watched and adding back in my plugins so I'm not out of the woods yet but I think I see the light
On an slightly unrelated note, is there a better way to save/export just the watched status of the videos? This whole process would have been much easier and less painful if I could have saved/exported/imported just the watched status of the files. I store all the images and whatnot inside the folders of the media and the watched status (and a very select few bookmarks) are all I lose when I completely blow out the db and start over. I'm assuming the first step would be to export the library into separate files and I know trakt tv allows syncing but I never got it to work and couldn't find any options for which direction to sync etc. Any advice would be, as always, greatly appreciated.