I have been an extremely satisfied VortexBox Appliance (VBA) owner since December 2009. In that time I've built an extensive music library while modifying both the hardware and software of my machine incrementally over the years. I've succeeded in converting several friends into avid VB enthusiasts.
As my collection grew, I found that my setup was struggling to handle database queries. Playback was fine, as long as I used mechanisms to locate discs that didn't result in substantial database operations. Mostly I would do an artist or an album query. A song query would invariably hang or crash LMS. I have an extensive classical collection and I spent a great deal of effort entering and maintaining the requisite metadata. I was looking forward to having the ability of, say, pulling up all of my recordings of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony or listing all of the recordings of a given pianist by composer. Erland Isaksson's LMS plugins (Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Mixed Tags, etc) seemed ideally-suited for this task. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to run these queries they would either time out or LMS would crash.
I started a correspondence with Erland who couldn't have been more helpful. I sent him log files, database files, and several other diagnostics. I began noticing that LMS was also spontaneously dying overnight with out-of-memory errors. My machine was a standard VBA with 1 GB of RAM and an original 2TB of disc space expanded to 5TB, with my collection totaling approximately 120,000 tracks. I also keep an MP3 mirror and run Subsonic. There have been many threads over the years in the VortexBox forums inquiring about whether 1GB of memory is sufficient. The standard answer was that VB used far less than 1GB and that more memory shouldn't lead to increased performance.
After getting absolutely nowhere after many months of happy listening but growing frustration with my limited capabilities, I decided to build a new server box. I bought a new Lenovo box from Fry's for $299. It had 6GB of memory (massive overkill), a 2.8 Ghz dual-core AMD processor, and a 500GB drive preloaded with Windows 7. It took me about $300 and less than 10 minutes to install two new 3TB drives (pulling and putting aside the Windows disc) along with a USB3 card. In about an hour I had a fully-functioning VB. In about a 24 hours, all of my music and settings were transferred from the old box.
My results have been jaw-dropping. Not only are all of my Custom Browse queries running, they usually return results within one or two seconds. There is clearly significant caching going on, so after the first query things go much more swiftly thereafter. I can search by song now, where on my old box a song query would have been equivalent to hitting the Stop LMS button. And I can do all of this with music playing, literally without missing a beat. I've been looking at the System Status figures while I run queries. In steady state, kernel and applications use about 1.3 GB of memory. The rest is spent on caching, buffers, and disk swap.
My suspicion is that while LMS and Subsonic can run on a VBA with less than 1GB of RAM, a large collection combined with complex queries pushed the hardware over the brink. I didn't structure my upgrade as a controlled experiment. Perhaps merely increasing RAM to 2GB on my VBA would have worked nearly as well (none of the diagnostics ever suggested that my VBA was CPU-bound). I just wanted to pass on that for users of Erland's LMS plugins with large libraries, the current VBA hardware configuration may not be insufficient to utilize the full capabilities of the LMS package.
The good news is that I am absolutely thrilled with my new VB setup. I wish realized sooner that my problems were hardware-related. I'm posting this in the hope of helping others who may be struggling with similar issues.
As my collection grew, I found that my setup was struggling to handle database queries. Playback was fine, as long as I used mechanisms to locate discs that didn't result in substantial database operations. Mostly I would do an artist or an album query. A song query would invariably hang or crash LMS. I have an extensive classical collection and I spent a great deal of effort entering and maintaining the requisite metadata. I was looking forward to having the ability of, say, pulling up all of my recordings of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony or listing all of the recordings of a given pianist by composer. Erland Isaksson's LMS plugins (Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Mixed Tags, etc) seemed ideally-suited for this task. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to run these queries they would either time out or LMS would crash.
I started a correspondence with Erland who couldn't have been more helpful. I sent him log files, database files, and several other diagnostics. I began noticing that LMS was also spontaneously dying overnight with out-of-memory errors. My machine was a standard VBA with 1 GB of RAM and an original 2TB of disc space expanded to 5TB, with my collection totaling approximately 120,000 tracks. I also keep an MP3 mirror and run Subsonic. There have been many threads over the years in the VortexBox forums inquiring about whether 1GB of memory is sufficient. The standard answer was that VB used far less than 1GB and that more memory shouldn't lead to increased performance.
After getting absolutely nowhere after many months of happy listening but growing frustration with my limited capabilities, I decided to build a new server box. I bought a new Lenovo box from Fry's for $299. It had 6GB of memory (massive overkill), a 2.8 Ghz dual-core AMD processor, and a 500GB drive preloaded with Windows 7. It took me about $300 and less than 10 minutes to install two new 3TB drives (pulling and putting aside the Windows disc) along with a USB3 card. In about an hour I had a fully-functioning VB. In about a 24 hours, all of my music and settings were transferred from the old box.
My results have been jaw-dropping. Not only are all of my Custom Browse queries running, they usually return results within one or two seconds. There is clearly significant caching going on, so after the first query things go much more swiftly thereafter. I can search by song now, where on my old box a song query would have been equivalent to hitting the Stop LMS button. And I can do all of this with music playing, literally without missing a beat. I've been looking at the System Status figures while I run queries. In steady state, kernel and applications use about 1.3 GB of memory. The rest is spent on caching, buffers, and disk swap.
My suspicion is that while LMS and Subsonic can run on a VBA with less than 1GB of RAM, a large collection combined with complex queries pushed the hardware over the brink. I didn't structure my upgrade as a controlled experiment. Perhaps merely increasing RAM to 2GB on my VBA would have worked nearly as well (none of the diagnostics ever suggested that my VBA was CPU-bound). I just wanted to pass on that for users of Erland's LMS plugins with large libraries, the current VBA hardware configuration may not be insufficient to utilize the full capabilities of the LMS package.
The good news is that I am absolutely thrilled with my new VB setup. I wish realized sooner that my problems were hardware-related. I'm posting this in the hope of helping others who may be struggling with similar issues.