Actually, it’s almost exactly the other way around. All the “smarts” is on the client — the server is pretty dumb. Sorting, searching, almost all that stuff is done on the client.
For running in debug, set up a log file in your config, and then add “-d9 -Ddatabase,daap” to whatever starts mt-daapd (your init.d script?). You’ll get a lot of crap, but you’ll also get queries you can recognize as the queries to get various information. With -Ddatabase,daap you should see all db queries, as well as info about sending the data back to the client — so you should be able to see what parts take the longest.
As far as splitting into multiple databases, that might help, in that I think the nslu2’s biggest problem is memory starvation, and the inability to have enough free memory to build a decent cache for sqlite.
With smaller db, it might do better that way. I still think that with the right indexes, it would perform decently even on a NSLU2, though.
If not, I’ve fixed much of the sql to allow me to put the gdbm database back in. If I can’t get the sql to perform as well as I want, I’ll go back to gdbm.
— Ron