Subsonic Forum

Okay, first off, I love this program. It's epic.

Secondly, I'm using a PPC Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.10. (Mac G4 1.8GHz Dual Processor w/ 5.5 GByte of ram). SubSonic is stupidly slow. Like, it takes *DAYS* to index the database. While I understand the initial database creation will take time, (it is over a terabyte in size). It shouldn't take days, I've got a friend who recommended this program, and his database of roughly half the size takes mere minutes to create. Is it because it's the crappy implementation of Java under PPC? Browsing the database through a web browser is like pulling your nails out with a pair of pliers. If I could get this program to run quickly it'd be great, but right now it's almost unusable because of the speed, or lack thereof.

While I'm not bitching a fit, it may sound like that and I apologize. I'm just looking for a suggestion for a fix.

Any help anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated.

First thing that comes to mind, with a collection this big give the poor thing more ram to work with. The default 64 or 96MB wont cut it. I recomment 1GB for testing and then decrease until performance gets worse and step it up a bit again.

Can be done in the /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh at MAX_MEMORY or in whatever location the subsonic.sh is at your place.

good luck
3R3

3R3 wrote:First thing that comes to mind, with a collection this big give the poor thing more ram to work with. The default 64 or 96MB wont cut it. I recomment 1GB for testing and then decrease until performance gets worse and step it up a bit again.

Can be done in the /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh at MAX_MEMORY or in whatever location the subsonic.sh is at your place.

good luck
3R3

I gave it a gig (up from the 100 meg or so default) and it didn't help improve performance at all. I continued adding til I hit something like 3.5 gigs and it still didn't change anything. Thanks for the suggestion though.

As we all know, size matters, but one site I visit has reasonable performance with the following:

9,828 artists
11,012 albums
144,936 songs
724.01 GB (~ 11,247 hours)

I also know that this site doesn't have anywhere near as much horsepower as the hardware you're using. Have you tried setting up SS on this system with a much smaller test library, and found that that fixed the problem? It should be pretty easy to isolate library size as a factor to determine if that is really the source of your problem.

GJ51 wrote:As we all know, size matters, but one site I visit has reasonable performance with the following:

9,828 artists
11,012 albums
144,936 songs
724.01 GB (~ 11,247 hours)

I also know that this site doesn't have anywhere near as much horsepower as the hardware you're using. Have you tried setting up SS on this system with a much smaller test library, and found that that fixed the problem? It should be pretty easy to isolate library size as a factor to determine if that is really the source of your problem.

Yeah, the guy I know that runs it on a similar sized database is running it on a pentium 3 with half of a gig of ram. I have no idea why it's so bloody slow on mine.

Just for kicks, I installed subsonic on mac os directly (instead of Ubuntu PPC), and it's a little better, but still far from 'usable'. I'm not sure what's going on anymore.

Mine's faster, but I still wish it was as big as yours.

GJ51 wrote:Mine's faster, but I still wish it was as big as yours.

Just because it's big doesn't mean it's useful. When it takes 3 or 4 days to pay attention, it's kinda a pain in the ass.

I would find that very frustrating as well. I started with version 4.0 on Windows Home Server as an alternative to HP's Twonky Media that came with the HP MSS. What a bunch of crapware that was. After that experience, Subsonic was a real game changer for me. I've now got 3 servers running version 4.3, one on WHS, one on Server 2008, and one running on the SBS 7 beta as a virtual server on the server 08 box. I've never had any real major obstacles to getting Subsonic up and running. I've just been installing the next version, right over the top of the last install, and kept on going. For me, it's just been a matter of learning more and more about how best to use the program. That's why I really do sympathize with anyone who's having trouble getting it running right. I'm sure you feel like I did when I was swearing at Twonky Media.

I don't know all the ins & outs, but it does seem like there are more problems with the Linix/Unix and other non-windows installations. I've got a spare computer I use for testing, maybe I'll get ambitious and take a look at Ubuntu just to see what the problems are.

Bottom line, when it works, it's awesome. My whole family, here at home and relatives and friends are streaming music and video all over the place 24/7. I'm now focusing on library and format organization to optomize server throughput. I'm really atarting to narrow it down so that all my media will be formated into native JW Player files so that there isn't any on-the-fly transcoding going on. I was testing earlier and had 3 video windows open on my desktop while streaming a movie to my cell phone and the CPU load on the server was running at 3-10%. Ther were also a couple guests on the server at the same time. When you bypass the transcoding, I'm not sure what it would take to overload the server.

When it's working the way it's supposed to, it is truly awesome. Best software bargain in the history of computing.

on a whim i installed the standalone version of the software and saw a DRAMATIC performance increase. I don't know why. Does the standalone have Java staticly built into the software?