The beuty AMAROK is almost useless[SOLVED]

larand54 · l33t Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 695 Location: Sweden

I really love this thing and will not give it up....but..
It always have been slow building up the collection, 3-5 hours having around 70000 mp3:files on a USB disk, but once that was done there where no problems until for a couple of month's ago.
Then updates, that are done between tracks that are played, begun to be slow. Sometimes several minutes. And then when I replaced the old USB disk(300GB) with a new of 500GB the next thing started.
If I start AMAROK and forgot to mount the disk it starts building the collection again. This happends if I forget to exit amarok before logging out which result in an automatic startup of amarok next time I log in. Then I have to wait more than 4 hours before I can use the collection again.

I use MySQL normally but have tested SQLite but there is no significant difference. I can't even tell who is slowest.

Is AMAROK that slow building up the collection?
Is there any way to make AMAROK using the old collection without building it up again if AMAROK lost the connection to files for a while?

Need help :cry:

stan666 · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 9:00 am Post subject:

I don't think this is an issue with amarok. Try to import 70.000 mp3's from an USB-Stick with any other application and you will see that it will take as long as with amarok. My mp3-libary is not as big as yours (about 2500 Songs on my HD) so the import process takes only about 5 minutes.
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larand54 · l33t Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 695 Location: Sweden

Well, I forgot to tell that I also have used a SATA-disk and it did present any significant difference.
I think it should be a lot faster. If I use "EasyTAG" to scan all mp3-files it takes some time but less than 20 minutes or so.
Amarok also have to update the database - maybe it is there the problem is?

Hovever, I can live with this if only the updates between played tracks will run smoothly and that I don't need to rebuild the collection each time I start AMAROK without having the disk mounted. Of course I have to mount the disk to use the collection but I think it should be enough to mount it afterwards. The collection is, what I know, stored in the database and don't need the mp3-files to display. Of course I can not play the tracks :wink:

stan666 · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 1:03 pm Post subject:

i don't know exactly how amarok works, but I think if you start amarok without your usb-stick mounted it will scan all the songs and if a song is not found it will be removed from the database. Therefore if mounting your usb-stick amarok will have to add every single track that is stored on your stick because it has been removed by the initial startup-scan. Storing your files on an hard-disk should be a good idea in general.
_________________
BOFH Excuse #450:
Terrorists crashed an airplane into the server room, have to remove /bin/laden. (rm -rf /bin/laden)

Akkara · Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 1:07 pm Post subject:

I had also wondered about amarok's slow scanning, even though I don't have your impressive number of songs!

Some ideas of things to look at that might help, which I haven't had time to try yet, so I don't know if they really do help:

Filesystem read-ahead: Scanning music involves reading the header (the first 4K or so) of very many files. If the system is reading ahead in anticipation of needing the rest of the file (which of course isn't going to get read in a scan) the disk might be spending time there.

File-in-inode: I vaguely recall reading somewhere that some filesystems can keep the initial part of the file in its inode. If that can be arranged to be big enough to hold the header it might make scanning faster still since then only the inode will need to be read.

Curious if either of these help any.

mrbig4545 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 124

Have you tried unsetting the: watch folders for changes option in the settings, then you could start it without having the disc mounted, at least i think so

larand54 · l33t Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 695 Location: Sweden

mrbig4545,
Your advice resulted in an dramatic increase in speed - From more than 4 hours down to 4 minutes!!!

It's unbelivable so I don't dare to say this thing is solved, but hopefully it is.
May a rescan trigger the change detection? A rescan should disable such function so in that case this is really a bug in my opinion.

I'll wait a few days before I put SOLVED on this tread.

Many thanks to you all for your help and ideas.

euphi2 · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2004 Posts: 60

Another hint (regarding the initial collection scanning and also the search). In earlier days I noticed that the sqlite backend is far SLOWER than the mySQL backend.

This was about 2 years ago. As the mySQL backend is working fine I did not switch back to sqlite - so this problem may has been solved in the meantime.

baeksu · l33t Joined: 26 Sep 2004 Posts: 609 Location: Seoul, Korea

BitJam · Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:35 pm Post subject:

You can also try adding the following line to /etc/conf.d/local.stop:

numbaonestunna · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 48

BitJam · Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 12:24 am Post subject:

larand54 · l33t Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 695 Location: Sweden

Hello all,

After almost three weeks without any problem I must agree that this problem is solved.
The "watch folders for changes" option may be useful on smaller collections but as it almost trigger itself it doesn't looks to useful - at least noot for me.

I put "SOLVED" on this thread allthough I believe there is a problem with this option. At least it is not a GENTOO problem maybe I should put it on an AMAROK forum?

But thank's to you all for the help.