DrJ Wrote: > That indeed what I was trying to get at with my question. Simple data > streaming does not take much horsepower, and while the Ultra 5 will not > blind anyone with its speed, it is plenty good enough for filling a > simple Ethertube. Still, it is pretty small, consumes little power, > can easily be run headless, and is very inexpensive (I bought my last > one for $40 loaded). They are also reliable in spite of their being > the very low end of Sun's line a long time ago. > > Converting formats on-the-fly is not something I had considered. I'll > have to look into this more. The speed differences between lesser hardware and something beefier are mostly noticed in user interface responsiveness and library scanning times. I find the latter to be fairly unimportant, within reason. I'm not up for waiting 10 hours to scan my library as some NAS users put up with, but the difference between 15 and 30 minutes isn't worth worrying about.
It's the user interface, particularly the web interface that I use almost exclusively, where I can't tolerate long waits. The web UI of SlimServer is becoming more and more of a (read only) music library manager at the behest of users, with better search capability, some handy plugins, and an increasingly nice, but complex web interface. Some people on marginal hardware see occasional performance problems that affect the audio (causing drop outs) when they're streaming while using the web interface. Streaming and simultaneously scanning is impossible on many platforms. Version 6.5 will be utilizing MySQL with InnoDB tables for its database back end. No twelve-way joins, but once the dbms has been upgraded to MySQL I expect that a lot of queued up enhancement requests for the web interface will be forthcoming. These will require more and more complex database interaction; certainly four and five way joins aren't out of the question. I imagine Slim Server developers will have to walk a fairly thin line between features and complexity, since most users will not have dedicated servers and the application needs to run on everyday desktops and laptops being used for other tasks. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22854 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
