Best practices for building a Subsonic machine

[Boutros]

Howdy friends -

I have been using Subsonic in various iterations (Vanilla, MusicCabinet, MadSonic, etc.) for like 10 years now. Over time, my collection of music has grown pretty massive. Like, "8TB of about 50/50 FLAC/MP3 on a WD My Book" massive. As that collection has grown (and my desktop PC has aged), the performance of SS has degraded, to the point where now it's basically unusable.

I am in the market for a new desktop PC, to be used primarily for running Subsonic (possibly reverting to MusicCabinet), and it occurred to me to ask here: what are the components that I should be looking at to significantly improve SS performance in handling my absurdly oversized database? Is it a question of more RAM? Faster processor? More cores? All of the above?

For context, here's my current machine:

Asus Essentio Desktop PC - 4th Gen. Intel Core i5-4570 3.2GHz, 8GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650, Windows 8 64-bit - M51AC-US006S

Really appreciate any advice anyone might be able to offer. My SS has been down for months, and I'm looking at all the year-end lists and realizing I basically haven't listened to music in 2021 because of this, and that makes me sad. Gotta do better in 2022...

[acroyear]

To be honest, i'm not sure the machine is the limitation.

First look at what your memory allocation is for your subsonic server (it is in a config file somewhere). If you're still only allocating 128m instead of 1g, that may be a thing. All the memory on the box itself does nothing if the application is told to not use it.

Another is the DB itself - a DB designed for smaller data sets (like hsql is) may not be able to handle the number of records - hash algorithms may be hitting a lot of collisions, costing time. A faster processor and more memory helps, but the algorithm is still going to be inherently slow. Moving to MariaDB may help that.

The size of the files doesn't matter so much as the number - a flac is the same as an mp3 as far as the subsonic memory goes in that regard.

The next limitation may be (and again, this comes down to a hash problem) is the album artwork cache. It is likely VERY large and also full of stuff that you don't have anymore if you moved files around. Wiping that may help in the long term (even if initially page loads seems lower as the artwork has to be re-processed), but I'd wait to try other solutions first.

[Arniceous]

Howdy friends -

I have been using Subsonic in various iterations (Vanilla, MusicCabinet, MadSonic, etc.) for like 10 years now. Over time, my collection of music has grown pretty massive. Like, "8TB of about 50/50 FLAC/MP3 on a WD My Book" massive. As that collection has grown (and my desktop PC has aged), the performance of SS has degraded, to the point where now it's basically unusable.

I am in the market for a new desktop PC, to be used primarily for running Subsonic (possibly reverting to MusicCabinet), and it occurred to me to ask here: what are the components that I should be looking at to significantly improve SS performance in handling my absurdly oversized database? Is it a question of more RAM? Faster processor? More cores? All of the above?

For context, here's my current machine:

Asus Essentio Desktop PC - 4th Gen. Intel Core i5-4570 3.2GHz, 8GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650, Windows 8 64-bit - M51AC-US006S

Really appreciate any advice anyone might be able to offer. My SS has been down for months, and I'm looking at all the year-end lists and realizing I basically haven't listened to music in 2021 because of this, and that makes me sad. Gotta do better in 2022...

Well I'm a NAS user, if you plan on using a computer to power your library using subsonic, look at mediasonic enclosures they make a 4 bay unit that requires a computer with a raid controller card as I only use WD Red 7200 RPM 6TB 8TB 10TB etc.. that vital . The enclosure had proper Colling fans set them to high . I don't run win10, win11, or Win8.1 but maxing out ram is always a good thing also check router settings for max transfer rate, that made a difference for me as well. Final thought if you can't afford a NAS the mediasonic enclosures on Amazon Newegg wherever are the cheapest option and a raid controller via PCIe x 4 or x 8 slot must be available on mobo.