NSLU2 Performance Tips?

[Anonymous]

I’ve got my MP3 library (16,000+ songs) on a TeraStation Pro share and I’m running my Turbo NSLU unslung 6.8 to a flash drive on drive 2 (where songs.db is), nothing is on drive 1. I’m using a SoundBridge as the music client. Everything is connected through a wired switch.

Here’s the question: Can anyone suggest tips to speed up the response to a “Browse Artists” request from my SoundBridge? I’ve created an index on artists using SQLITE, but it still takes over 20 seconds. Once I have my artist list, selecting an artist results in an almost instantaneous response of albums by that artist. And when I’m playing, everthing works great. I “stress” tested it and was able to serve 5 clients (3 soundbridge and 2 iTunes) without pause . . . . I was even able to test it through a “rescan”, so I’ve got to believe there’s an opportunity to reduce the 20 seconds. If you have a SoundBridge, you know how difficult it is to avoid going through “Browse Artists” for nearly anything.

[fizze]

erm, isnt the terastation capable of running Firefly too?

[Anonymous]

@fizze wrote:

erm, isnt the terastation capable of running Firefly too?

Yes, the TeraStation runs FireFly, though I’m currently running Twonky on the TeraStation for video (work in progress), pictures and MP3, but (according to Christian at TwonkyVision) the TeraStation doesn’t have the horsepower to transcode FLAC. on the fly I hoped to use the NSLU to be my FLAC music server using FireFly.

[fizze]

Hm alrighty.
Well, the NSLU2 isnt very powerful either. Nm though.

I am running a Wizd music server off the very same NSLU2 that runs my firefly 😉

Depending on your video client, you might get way better performance when you use a different video server. I myself am using a Showcenter 200 as a client.

[rpedde]

@fizze wrote:

Well, the NSLU2 isnt very powerful either. Nm though.

An un-de-underclocked NSLU2 runs at 133 bogomips. The original terastation is the same hardware as my linkstation-hg, which runs at 174 bogomips.

Plus, the linkstation has hardware FPU. Upshot – the linkstation/terastation is *much* faster than the nslu2. Not sure why the terastation won’t decode flac in realtime — the slug will.

As far as being on-topic, you might try moving your db to a faster device. Either a network mounted file system or a hard drive. That should help some.

Oh, and /tmp, too. move that off to someplace fast, rather than the flash disk — it builds a temp table for select distinct queries, so a slow /tmp will cause problems.

— Ron

[CCRDude]

My Kurobox is more or less the same as the Linkstation as well, hardware-wise and from performance; 173 Bogomips as well.

I’ve just tried, am streaming both transcoded flac to my machine, and mp3 to my Soundbridge, transcoding takes about 10% cpu time, not more.

So it should have horsepower enough for even multiple transcodings at the same time 😉

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

Upshot – the linkstation/terastation is *much* faster than the nslu2. Not sure why the terastation won’t decode flac in realtime — the slug will.
— Ron

Hmmm, maybe the problem is Twonky . Having said that, whether Firefly or Twonky, the actual decoding would be done by the same external decoder, correct?

I wonder if anyone else is running FireFly on a TeraStation Pro and decoding FLAC? I may give it a try. I’m just trying to get everything off the home XP box and load it onto “server-oriented” boxes that can stream my media 24/7 reliably.

[CCRDude]

As Ron said, TeraStation & LinkStation have the same hardware, as have LinkStation & Buffalo. No wonder since they’re all produced by Buffalo, why should they develop more than one embedded platform with nearly the same specs 😉 So I’m running it on the Kurobox with above performance.

Whether its on the same decoder depends. Firefly is imho using an external one, which means that you can now easily replace flac 1.1.3 with 1.1.4 and gain their speed improvements. flac is available in source as well though, if Twonky maybe did compile directly with flac 1.1.0 and never updated that to newer versions, instead of using an external library, that would qualify for some quite slower speed (I do not intend to say they do, just that this is the only circumstance I could image, other than some really creepy code around for streaming, which I can’t image much less… only Slimserver is that bad that it has a multiply-by-30 factor 😀 ).

[S80_UK]

@CCRDude wrote:

Firefly is imho using an external one, which means that you can now easily replace flac 1.1.3 with 1.1.4 and gain their speed improvements.

I see that flac 1.1.4 claims some significant speed benefits due to re-write of its internal buffer handling, although it’s not yet a formal release.

[CCRDude]

Yes, that’s right, the page announcing it is in CVS, but not on the main site.

But actually, flac taking only 10% of Kuroboxes CPU was the flac included in Debian, which is 1.1.1, so its quite old and still fast enough for the Kurobox.

Probably should update that soon… hmm… I don’t like moving away from official Debian packages, but newer flac versions brought nice things like album art in metatags, not sure if that would work with the old version installed (Firefly has its own parser imho, but not sure about Slimserver).

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