[FAQ] How large can a Library become?

[ForSSux]

Hi ,

Question How large can a database become before the reaction speed on the interface makes it slow.
Answer Very large look at the screenshot..

Only when switching between different tabs there is some noticeable lag...like going to Radio for example...takes roughly 12 seconds...

Anyway I'm very pleased with it.

Kind Regards
Guy Forssman

[GJ51]

The practical limits are probably determined by the underlying power of the hardware.

There are some great deals on servers on ebay that would fit the bill that are VERY affordable. There is a big turnover going on right now as megadatacenters are replacing Westmere based servers. I'm seeing 4 node dual quad core Xeon 2U servers with 96 GB of ram and 12 drive bays going for $800 - $900. That would give you room for 48TB of storage. Each node has 2 CPU's 24GB ram. and dual nics.

Unfrotunately, I just got the bill for $40k for my son's first year in college.

[GJ51]

I recently chatted with a guy that has 30TB of music! He tried Subsonic on some pretty stout hardware and allocated almost 4GB of ram to the java memory and no matter what he tried Subsonic would stop scanning files at 1.5 million tracks.

We may have just found the limit of Subsonic's capability. Not a big issue though as it would take 8.5 years of listening 24/7 to listen to that many tracks. The limit barrier will probably be raised by then.

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11995

[ForSSux]

Hi There,

I have a dual processor of the type Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.60GHz K8 with 8 GB of ram although already from 2005 I think it should be potent enough to do the task.
I noticed that with the recent GUI the system overall feels slightly less responsive.
Hitting one of the horizontal menu choices be it radio , mood or even settings produces a waiting of roughly 10 seconds.

Kind Regards
Guy Forssman

We have
8,518 all artists
2,779 album artists
12,864 albums
224 genres
507,657 songs
1447.50 GB (~ 10,658 hours)

[GJ51]

There are many factors that go into determining performance. Library size is a big part of the equation, but so are many other things.

I have a dedicated music server that runs on an HP ex485 that has been upgraded to a dual core 3.0GHZ Zeon CPU and 4GB of ram that still runs on WHS v1. It also servers as archival file storage, but normally Madsonic is the only application running on that system.

2,290 all artists
1,803 album artists
5,755 albums
163 genres
54,351 songs
327.10 GB (~ 3,588 hours

Version 5.0.3480.beta2
Server jetty-6.1.x, java 1.7.0_21, Windows 2003 (148.5 MB / 247.5 MB)

It's very quick and responsive. I have also tested it by increasing the library size by including backup directories stored on a network share to much larger size without any noticeable degradation in front end performance.

Your hardware should handle Madsonic very well unless other processes or disk activities are running concurrently. When I run into performance issues I open task manager and start looking at what processes are taking CPU cycles and what kind of disk and network traffic may be going on at the same time.

HTH

[Ricky1252]

Did you try rescanning your media folders? I had the same issue after upgrading, rescan fixed the response time.

[ForSSux]

Hi There,

A lot of time has passed by and lately I thought why not upgrade the Madsonic to % 3860 and see how fast it has become..

The old hardware failed me and so I'm using a HP Z800 with 8G of ram and a X5650 on 2.6GHz running
Os is a Windows 7 64 bit...

I'm still feeling the delay though it's reduced to 7 seconds.


Regards
Guy Forssman

[Lars]

Hi There,

A lot of time has passed by and lately I thought why not upgrade the Madsonic to % 3860 and see how fast it has become..

The old hardware failed me and so I'm using a HP Z800 with 8G of ram and a X5650 on 2.6GHz running
Os is a Windows 7 64 bit...

I'm still feeling the delay though it's reduced to 7 seconds.


Regards
Guy Forssman

just to chime in here.
i use madsonic 1.6 (the 3880 release) on unraid 6-beta6. with rather low level hardware (cpu: athlon II x2 270, 8gb ram), os is obviously unraid/ slackware 3.15.

at this point i have about 15tb of music (only) on it, amounting to about 760k+ songs, 95k albums. so far it takes all that very well, with sometimes noticable slack (several sec) when switching between screens.
using madsonic i have never a huge cpu usage/ ram usage.
makes me wonder, if the choking point is actually the hardware or the madsonic memory limit! it seems madsonic will not start anymore if i set the memory limit above 1630mb!

insight would be much appreciated!

cheers, L

[GJ51]

Hi There,

A lot of time has passed by and lately I thought why not upgrade the Madsonic to % 3860 and see how fast it has become..

The old hardware failed me and so I'm using a HP Z800 with 8G of ram and a X5650 on 2.6GHz running
Os is a Windows 7 64 bit...

I'm still feeling the delay though it's reduced to 7 seconds.


Regards
Guy Forssman

An HP Z800 is certainly more than enough hardware. My only suggestion would be to run the Tomcat version as I've found it to be a bit faster than the standard Windows install. Another factor that doesn't seem to be getting much attention in this discussion is the hard drive. Obviously having an SSD would be a big boost, but I've also recently been using the 2 TB Seagate hybrid drives as the boot drive in my custom HP MediaSmart servers and that has been a big factor in improving the responsiveness on those units.

I also run an instance on a RAID 50 array that is very fast and the load times on that are virtually instantaneous.

[GJ51]

Hi There,

A lot of time has passed by and lately I thought why not upgrade the Madsonic to % 3860 and see how fast it has become..

The old hardware failed me and so I'm using a HP Z800 with 8G of ram and a X5650 on 2.6GHz running
Os is a Windows 7 64 bit...

I'm still feeling the delay though it's reduced to 7 seconds.


Regards
Guy Forssman

just to chime in here.
i use madsonic 1.6 (the 3880 release) on unraid 6-beta6. with rather low level hardware (cpu: athlon II x2 270, 8gb ram), os is obviously unraid/ slackware 3.15.

at this point i have about 15tb of music (only) on it, amounting to about 760k+ songs, 95k albums. so far it takes all that very well, with sometimes noticable slack (several sec) when switching between screens.
using madsonic i have never a huge cpu usage/ ram usage.
makes me wonder, if the choking point is actually the hardware or the madsonic memory limit! it seems madsonic will not start anymore if i set the memory limit above 1630mb!

insight would be much appreciated!

cheers, L

You probably have a better feel for this than I do, but I have seen discussions about the memory limit that seem to indicate that for most setups 256 is usually adequate and the occasional claim that some have gone to 512 with really large libraries. I haven't seen anyone claim that they needed more than 512 and have seen some claims that going larger actually started to cause problems or diminish performance. Can't recall seeing anything really definitive that explains the how and why of what the ideal memory settings are for a given setup, but from the feedback it suggests that most users don't benefit by going higher than 512.

[Lars]

Hi There,

A lot of time has passed by and lately I thought why not upgrade the Madsonic to % 3860 and see how fast it has become..

The old hardware failed me and so I'm using a HP Z800 with 8G of ram and a X5650 on 2.6GHz running
Os is a Windows 7 64 bit...

I'm still feeling the delay though it's reduced to 7 seconds.


Regards
Guy Forssman

just to chime in here.
i use madsonic 1.6 (the 3880 release) on unraid 6-beta6. with rather low level hardware (cpu: athlon II x2 270, 8gb ram), os is obviously unraid/ slackware 3.15.

at this point i have about 15tb of music (only) on it, amounting to about 760k+ songs, 95k albums. so far it takes all that very well, with sometimes noticable slack (several sec) when switching between screens.
using madsonic i have never a huge cpu usage/ ram usage.
makes me wonder, if the choking point is actually the hardware or the madsonic memory limit! it seems madsonic will not start anymore if i set the memory limit above 1630mb!

insight would be much appreciated!

cheers, L

You probably have a better feel for this than I do, but I have seen discussions about the memory limit that seem to indicate that for most setups 256 is usually adequate and the occasional claim that some have gone to 512 with really large libraries. I haven't seen anyone claim that they needed more than 512 and have seen some claims that going larger actually started to cause problems or diminish performance. Can't recall seeing anything really definitive that explains the how and why of what the ideal memory settings are for a given setup, but from the feedback it suggests that most users don't benefit by going higher than 512.

i have no fact based knowledge about the amount of memory actually needed. so i just talking about my experience here - nothing to do with any kind of programming issues. that said, i had cases over time where my database updates just died. basically went up to (just example) 250k files and that was it. oncew i increased the memory limit it kept going, 'til i hit a new 'limit'. so i increased again and it worked for some time.....
at one point i hit over 1500 to make things work for an update. i have to amend my statement from above as well. after restarting the server i can go way beyond 1630. it was before kind of the magic line with subsonic.
i still increase in smallish steps (couple hundred mb) till i hit a limit again.
anyway, what i try to say - i am sure for many ppl 256 and 512 is plenty. and generally in daily use it ssems to do with even less. but during database update more (dependent on amount of music) seems to be a crucial point.

cheers, L

ps: if it gets the memory it will happily take it and finish tasks noticable faster!

[DoCC]

running 24/7

7.832 Interpreten
2.068 Album Interpreten
12.197 Alben
642 Genre
98.892 Songs
57 Videos
120 Podcasts
1 Audiobücher
914,56 GB (~ 8.711 Stunden)

in a little VM hosted on an HP ML110 G7 with 24 GB RAM

so nothing special. runs like a charm

[taoism]

16,178 all artists
7,889 album artists
36,805 albums
0 genres
404,846 songs
5 videos
0 podcasts
139 audiobooks
2437.16 GB (~ 32,953 hours)

I think i have a few of you beat.

[Matt Zornig]

Quite an old but interesting topic.

runnning on a synology 1815+ with a 2.4GHz CPU and 6GB of Ram.

The HW is idle most of the time (except when java freaks out), when doing database-searches, but I found my browser (Firefox 50.x with a huge amount of addons to protect privacy, an UI-comfort, etc.) might be the bottleneck. Displaying all the linked albums/artists and refreshing the data shown on the webgui consumes a lot of resources.
I click something on the webgui and sometimes need to wait about 10-30 seconds until a result is shown.