Terrible performance and timouts with just 20-track folders

[Morkeleb]

Hi.

As other people have already experienced, I do as well, just much worse:

When trying to load directories with about 20 or more tracks in them, the android client gives me a timeout.
This is not a networking issue since I have that on the local wireless g lan with enough bandwidth.
I also experience slows speeds when browsing the content on the same machine subsonic is running on, just not that bad.

I particularly notice this problem when trying to access files that are served from my NAS system (which is a really fast one - qnap ts-459 pro - that can deliver at 100mb/s). Loading from local disk is better, but i still get timouts.

I am running subsonic 4.4 on a windows machine with core i7 processor, 2,6 ghz and 6gb of ram.

I think the problem is particularly bad with songs where the album cover images integrated in the mp3 file.

This is really in-acceptable!

I already tried re-installing subsonic two times, tried to limit delivering of only small 1 album image, and tried with only a small index of a few hundred files, and tried to re-generate the index.
It's always the same problem on the android client: a timeout.

The timeout on the android client is just set too low.

But even on a pc, the performance of subsonic is bad. Only directories with less very few entries lods in acceptable time, and on android client the directory has to be about 5 or less entries to load without danger of a timout!

Please note that once a directory is loaded access to the actual files, even video files with 720p is fine!
Please also note that the first level directory structure which only contains other directories with artists loads fast as well, it is just the directories that actually contain files or directories that show cover images that are slow.
Just the loading of directory contents is terribly slow.

I noticed that for files on local disk i can load directories with about 40 files ok, wheras when loading from nas I already get timout with 20 files.
Also, as mentioned, when the dirctory has files that contain album cover images the timout ocurrs with smaller directory sizes.


Two things need to be done:
- fix directory loading performance (what makes this so slow actually? what is subsonic doing that takes so much time? is there already a way to fix or improve this?)
- increase timeout on android client

Since I guess the first point can not be fixed any time soon, i'd at least like to know things I can try to improve speed (or what I may doing wrong). It seemes others can load much(!) larger directories and only get performance problem with gigantic ones (several hundred files).
There must be somthing terribly wrong if this happens for me with just typical 20-track folders!

I really need help here!

[GJ51]

See if you have the same issues on my sites.

[Morkeleb]

I connected to your site (http://garyj51.subsonic.org, the other one did not work) with the android client and it worked much better, almost no timeouts.

However I noticed:
- load times are much longer with directries containing more files, there is still much room for improvement but the response times on your server are in a tollerable (and for smaller directories even ok) area

- I did not find directories yet on your server that contained more than 20 or so files (I do have such on mine, because I have quite a few audio books that tend to have longer lists of files sometimes).

So i guess there must be obvioulsy something I can do to improve performance from my server, however I really just did the standard setup - download subsonic, install it, change port to 82 (80 is used), provide directories of content, configure users, configure some minor settings, let index generate again and try accessing (note that since I do not know of an indication to look on when index generation is finished I even waited for a day to try again to make sure indexing was finished).

Can you help me track down my problem or suggest things I try?

[GJ51]

I suggest keeping the file structure as simple as possible. The best method I've found is to keep the direstory holding the data closr to the root. That is, C:\Music\Artist\Album\Track, as opposeed to something more complicated like, C:\Subsonic\music\Jazz\1980's\Artist\Album\track.

The Shane's world tutorial has a section on this at the end of his document:

http://monroeworld.com/android/subsonic/

I forgot that the other server occasionally sleeps, I'll fix that today.

Loading files from the NAS will introduce some additional lag time, I've also found it increases indexing time a bit. Not totally a deal breaker, but it does slow things down a bit. I've occasionally connected to my trusty old Linksys Nas and have never experienced a timeout on my phone. Running windows on a core i7, you have more than enough horsepower to run SS at fast response speeds. When I load my SS locally on my network, they load instantaneoussly through the browser. I've never noticed a significant difference over internet.

I think we're both missing something, but I'm not sure what it is.

What browser do you use internally?

My other server is now online. I use Chrome 9 for SS internally as it is clean and fast and looks great running SS. If you have IE 9 you will see some strange behavirs unless you click on the compatibility mode button.

[Morkeleb]

Hi.

I removed the nas folders from the shared paths and started recreating the index. The performance is now fine, better than yours i think.

Performance on local disk is now still good after adding NAS again, but only on local disk. On NAS its still horrible.

I thought the reason for subsonic to create an indes is to allow loading fast without having to access each file again just for displaying it.
It seemes this is not the case.

Anyway - any suggestions on how to improve NAS performance.
I mean, whats the the sense in having a NAS system where you can store all your large ammounts of data securely when you cannot access it well over it.

Maybe it's possible to install subsonic directly on the nas, however I wonder if a dual core atom processor is fast enough for that, especially when I also like to stream video.

Btw:
On iphone i've been using air video or stream to me, which work much better, but i'm switching to android so those are not an option anymore.

Maybe there should be an an option added in subsonic not to try load album covers at all for some shared media paths if that helps avoiding accessing the NAS all the time and thus increase performance there.
Or maybe some general tweaking to make access to NAS servers more performant.
I'm pretty sure the was subsonic access the file system is not suited well for NAS and this is a subsonic problem, since performance on my nas over the other mentioned software is fine.

I still think that the timout on the android client is too low.

[GJ51]

Are you using the Android app? i have no problems loading my library or any others I connect to. Even over 3g my phone loads the library in under 2 sec. I also visit several large sites on the phone without the problems you're describing.

[Morkeleb]

Ofcourse I am using the android app, have mentioned this multiple times now.

Try out my server:
http://85.126.136.171:82/
username/password is guest

You will see some folders.
Compare between AudioBooks2 which should work ok which is on local disk and AudioBooks NAS which will probably give you timeouts.

Just to be sure:
Is version 2.6 the latest of the subsonic android app?

[bushman4]

I just connected to your server and was able to browse your folders WAAAY faster than I could ever browse my server. Maybe two second load time, no matter the folder.

Mine times out frequently. But I have 3,917 artists, 6,759 albums, 66,683 songs, 3,337.64 GB (~ 51,848 hours)

Can't listed to the Hitchhiker's Guide though, because your trial is expired!

Hope this helps,

Glenn

[Morkeleb]

What do you mean with my trial is expired?

I thought subsonic is not time-limited.

I can brows and stream the folders ok (if they are not on the NAS of course).
The Douglas Adams folder was empty (or rather just contained zip files), so thats why you did not see anything there.
I added copied over the full contents from the NAS for further testing.

Concerning the speeds:
Please make sure you try if you also get fast respones in the "AudioBooks NAS" folder. Thats where I have problems, as mentioned "AudioBooks2" is from local disc and I have no problems with that one too.

If you want to try a hard directory go to Frank Schätzing -> Der Schwarm, there are 183 mp3 in there. In that directory I get a timeout even on the local disc.

I did not yet update the search index though.
The library currently contains 5910 files with 47,8gb.

[donpearson]

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[bushman4]

I chose just the NAS folder. I was able to very quickly browse all of the folders I tried at random.

When I tried the folder you mentioned specifically it took almost thirty seconds to come up with a track listing, but it did so with no time out.

Again, this is all with just the NAS folder selected.

Perhaps it is your phone or phone network...

HTH,

Glenn

[Morkeleb]

Thanx for testing.

Did you try out with an android client or some other client?
If so, which version of the client did you use and where did you get it from?

I only get the timeouts on android: It tries for 10 seconds, then retries another 4 times, each time 10 seconds.
When the server takes 30 it will obviously never work.

It is not a network issue since I also got those problems when I am connected to my local wlan with g speeds, and the files from local storage load quickly enough even on a 3g network.

[bushman4]

I used my android phone on verizon's 3g network (not even wi-fi). I am using the client that is available for download for free in the Android Store. Version 2.6.

Glenn

[GJ51]

If you want to try a hard directory go to Frank Schätzing -> Der Schwarm, there are 183 mp3 in there. In that directory I get a timeout even on the local disc.

I've played around with this a bit and find that this is a rather unusual directory in that all these files have similar names and are pretty short in duration. I think if you could find a utility to splice the files together into 26 files, one for each "Titel" you would get much better performance for this directory.

[allroy1975]

I'm not sure what's up with my android client (i'm currently on an EVO 4g and for the last month or 2 have been using CyanogenMod 7's Gingerbread roms with whatever the most current Savaged-Zen -usually BFS- kernel is).
I know this stuff is all "unsupported" but Subsonic just seems to run like crap after I've used it. for example...

Last night I updated to CM7 nighly build 12. this requires a flush of the cache and dalvik cache. Naturally, when I opened subsonic for the first time today the playlist was empty and everything was quick. even loading my 150k playlist. but I know that tomorrow morning when I go to play it, it's gonna be slow and time out all over the place. Sometimes even between songs it'll just hang, and god forbid I want to use Bluetooth to skip or pause a track.

it also seems to take a long time to load my playlist from any web browser.

I started messing around with older apks for subsonic the other night and it seemed like 1.8 worked really well. it was missing a lot of things (I tried a lot of old versions, so I could be a little off here..I probably should have taken notes) like no widget and no long press on playlists to "play all". but the overall functionality was better. Oh, I don't think it would play nice with my Bluetooth buttons either.

I forgot how much more I liked the full screen album art than the pretty new fancy stuff. I don't care what it looks like, I just want to listen to music...but if I want to see album art, it was nice in the old days cuz it was bigger. like going from records to...Minidisks.

at this point I've stopped using Subsonic most of the time and am just listening to podcasts and stuff with DogCatcher. Subsonic is still an amazing tool...if I want to browse my collection to a single song or album, I can do it in a matter of seconds. but the way I use my music...subsonic just isn't cutting it. The crap part it, there doesn't seem to be anything else that cuts it either.

I don't know if this could be effing with the client but..the way I do it...is I used winamp to create a huge playlist, then saved the playlist to my subsonic playlist folder. I then used a program called id3kill (http://www.headstrong.de/id3kill-nolonger.shtml) to remove all the #EXTINF lines in the m3u and make it a little smaller. Then I found a randomizing script (http://garymarks.com/pbo/Randomized_Playlist_Maker.txt) that I can run on that m3u nightly. So every morning a playlist of all my favorite tunes is re-shuffled.

I really love subsonic...I just wish it worked better.