I'm relatively new to the forum so I've been doing my best to read as much as I can to quickly get up to speed. I had plenty of time to fiddle with Slimserver without the use of an actual Squeezebox thanks to UPS (have to thank the Slim support guys for finally putting UPS in their place and sending out a replacement unit).
Anyway, I've seen countless numbers of posts asking what hardware to use as a server and even more replies suggesting nearly any system will work fine. That even a lowly PII at a couple of hundred MHz is suitable, etc... I'm sure you can run Slimserver on an imbedded Micro if the software dependancies are all met, but a slow system is far from ideal. I first installed Slimserver on one of the machines I keep on 24/7. A Mac server that runs a few development mySQL databases, bug tracking software and SVN. These services require very little CPU time as they're only access a few times per day. The hardware consists of a Dual Processor 533MHz PowerMac G4 connected to my LAN with 100baseTX. While browsing the web interface in cover mode I've been finding load times unacceptably slow. It's painful to use the web interface for extended periods. I'm sure some people may find it acceptable, but when I get better performance loading graphics intensive sites from the Internet, that's a problem for me. Yesterday I increased the thumbnail size from 100 pixels to 120 pixels - which obviously made matters even worse. Today as an experiment, I moved all the music over to an Intel Core Duo (1.66GHz) Mac mini. Its boot drive is a slow 2.5" model but the music is on the same 250GB external Firewire drive as I've been using all along. I copied the whole preferences folder from the G4 and installed the current (11-29) nightly (same as the G4). The complete scan/indexing of the library was much faster than on the G4. That's not a huge concern as I'll usually clear the whole DB manually before going to bed if I need to load updated tracks (scanning from the UI whether complete or not, is just not as reliable yet). Speed while browsing has drammatically increased. I mean, I still find the web interface somewhat slow (Perl is slow, there's no way around that), but it's simply much faster than it was on the G4. If I had a faster system I'd continue testing with that to get additional deltas, bt unfortunately I don't at the moment. Seeing as the 6.5 stream uses mySQL, it only makes sense that Slimserver craves some CPU performance. While a lowly system may be able to stream tracks to one or more Squeezeboxes without much effort, access to the web UI - and therefore complex real-time queries, requires some muscle. So what's the point? Just an observation. I'm not suggesting everyone go out and buy new machines. I'm not certain I can leave the mini as the server for long - it's one of my development and test machines aqnd I'd hate to have to interrupt the music while working on a problem with my own software. If I can make a wish for 7.0 it's for increased stability and speed, while eliminating the outstanding bugs of the 6.5 stream. I think most of us would wait on new features to have something solid to use in the meantime. -- MelonMonkey Bruno *'Twisted Melon - Fine Mac OS Software' (http://twistedmelon.com) | 'mira - Personal Control for your Apple Remote' (http://twistedmelon.com)* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MelonMonkey's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8466 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30145 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
