XBMC not optimized for large music libraries/low powered systems?

tboooe Wrote:Thank you Jonathan. I understand and expected the sharing the Thumbnails folder to slow things down. I just didnt expect that much. However, even when the Thumbnails was stored locally it would take 5-10 secs to load the Artist screen.

Looking forward to the texturecache. Will this still allow for sharing the Thumbnails folder between multiple XBMC clients?

What i did to speed this up on my slow boxes is use local storage synced by dropbox, I symlinked the libraries/thumbs to my dropbox folder and have so far 3 boxes in sync (one is in another house actually connected by a dedicated point to point wireless link) it's local storage except that it's synced up , pretty fast, the free dropbox account is more than enough for me so far

I'm using Eden beta, have 3 clients, and a windows home server, with mysql.

I found that storing thumbnails on the server really slowed things down for me. I had done it using the <pathsubstitution> tag in the advancedsettings.xml file, and while it did work, the lag when loading up any listing was driving me crazy (5-10 seconds simply to list the episodes in a single tv show)

After studying the log file, the database was finished with the query in about 0.1 seconds, and then the thumbnails were taking about 0.3 seconds each.

My ultimate solution was to keep the thumbnails on the local clients, and then each night I run a scheduled task on the server that synchronizes them all between the machines. After that xbmc ran like a charm. Very very snappy response times.

fbarwell Wrote:My ultimate solution was to keep the thumbnails on the local clients, and then each night I run a scheduled task on the server that synchronizes them all between the machines. After that xbmc ran like a charm. Very very snappy response times.

How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

(2012-01-26 20:02)BULLIT Wrote:  

fbarwell Wrote:My ultimate solution was to keep the thumbnails on the local clients, and then each night I run a scheduled task on the server that synchronizes them all between the machines. After that xbmc ran like a charm. Very very snappy response times.

How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

I'm also curious to know how this was done, as I would like to have them fully sync'd, but can't stand any delays and am thinking this is probably the most ideal method of doing this.

As an alternative, would it be possible to have xbmc cache the thumbnails the first time it fetches them, and in future instances only check to see if they've changed? I imagine things would slow down exponentially more if it's trying to fetch fanart as well as the thumbnails?

(2012-01-26 20:02)BULLIT Wrote:  How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

Here's a sample batch script for copying files using FTP.
http://www.howtogeek.com/50359/upload-fi...ch-script/

(2012-01-26 20:02)BULLIT Wrote:  How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

(2012-03-13 17:40)DaMizZa Wrote:  I'm also curious to know how this was done

For Windows based setups, just use commandline utility ROBOCOPY which you can freely download from Microsoft's site in their Resource Kit packages. It can be used to copy, sync, mirror folders across machines using either drive mappings or UNC paths. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy )

Resource Kit d/l URL: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/det...n&id=17657
(note: that link is for the 32bit version that will run on WinXP and Win2003 / original WHS version).

While I don't do the thumbnail syncing thing myself, I do a number of other things in my XBMC setup using Robocopy and it works like a charm. Just create a batch/cmd file with one Robocopy cmdline for each machine you want to sync with. The command should include the full path to the thumbnail files on one machine and the destination path to the thumbnail folder on another machine. Then use the builtin Windows scheduler service to schedule running that batch/cmd file on any one of your machines (preferably your server if you utilize one) on a regular basis at whatever frequency you like.

Note: While Robocopy itself is a windows executable/utility, the source and/or destination targets that you specify do not have to be Windows machines and can be anything that you address via a UNC name/path.

(2012-01-26 20:02)BULLIT Wrote:  How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

OK, y'all got me thinking. So I decide to try to build an addon to do this. Here's the thread for the addon. It's not even close to working yet, but just wanted you to be aware of it, and hopefully also get some input.

Cheers
Declan

(2012-01-26 20:02)BULLIT Wrote:  

fbarwell Wrote:My ultimate solution was to keep the thumbnails on the local clients, and then each night I run a scheduled task on the server that synchronizes them all between the machines. After that xbmc ran like a charm. Very very snappy response times.

How did you accomplish this? If you don't mind me asking.

Theres another approach I took today for this by installing allway sync on my server and syncing my main xbmc thumbnail folder with other xbmc htpc's throughout the house. Allway sync monitors the thumbnail folder of each machine so no matter where I update the library it will sync to the other machines.

So when I update library a, allway sync sees a change in the folder on library a and syncs it to library b and c. I have live monitoring on with a 1 minute delay in syncing. Im not seeing a decrease in performance from my server thats running allway sync but I did notice the "hd/sd icon and movie rating werent appearing right away.