Processing power required for UPnP control point

[DavidL]

I've been using the BubbleUPnP Android app in conjunction with MinimServer for over 3 years and it is far better than all the alternatives I tried. When I started using the app in 2014 I bought an Asus Nexus 7 tablet to act as a control point. At that time I had circa 50000 music tracks on my Synology DS412+ NAS and the initial response in accessing the library to load details for all albums in a genre was then very good. I now have 94000 tracks and this response time is now much longer. My wireless network runs at typically 30Mbps (measured at the tablet) so no problems there.
I have what is probably a very naive question. Do I need to get a tablet with a more powerful processor? If so I would be grateful for some recommendations (the tablet is only used for playing music via MinimServer and Spotify).
Thanks in advance for any help.
David

[tarnkappe]

I do not know. But you should also pay attention to the RAM the tablet has. Maybe this is the bottleneck?

Is it useful to load the list of all albums in a genre if you have so many? Wouldn't it be better to go the way by all artists of a genre and then select the lists of albums of only one artist?

[simoncn]

Are you saying the time from touching "n albums" to seeing the list of albums appear is too long? How long does this take and for how many albums?

Much of the time might be taken by transferring album art images. Unlike some other servers, MinimServer doesn't resize these to a smaller resolution before sending them. Do your album art images have very high resolutions?

[DavidL]

tarnkappe

A good point - I have the 16 GB model, however the machine tells me I've used 3.7 GB of 12 GB! Would a larger memory improve matters? I'd assumed the memory required for storing metadata would not be significant.

simoncn

To clarify here are details of exactly what I do:

The music library is set up in iTunes format i.e. Artist > Album. I have 93470 tracks in 18529 albums, sorted into 33 genres.
For classical music I use 'Album' for the name of a work e.g. 'Sibelius - Symphony No.5', and I use the Genre metadata property to categorise the classical music by period e.g. 'Classical - Baroque'.
My normal modus operandi for playing classical music is to first select a genre, then select 'albums', then select an album, or album/artist if I have more than 1 recording of a work.
The delays I am referring to occur between selecting 'albums' and the appearance of the slider at the right-hand side of the screen which I use to rapidly select the album to play. I have timed a couple of examples:
1) If I sel
ect the 'Classical-modern' genre (which contains 17794 tracks in 4898 albums) and then hit '4898 albums' it takes 4.6 seconds for the slider to appear at the right-hand side, which I use to quickly find the desired album.
2) If I select the 'Classical-baroque' genre (which contains 17366 tracks in 3055 albums) and then hit '3055 albums' it takes 3.2 seconds for the slider to appear.

Thus while 1-2 seconds wait was OK when I started expanding my library the delay has now become less acceptable, hence my original question. I could reduce the delay by splitting up my large genres but this could become difficult to use.

The only album art images I have are those picked up by iTunes. Many of those associated with CD albums have been lost when I split up classical CD albums into individual works with the result I have only a small number of album art images in the classical music genres.

David

[DavidHB]

@DavidL

It's interesting that you describe a browse sequence which includes an albums listing, as that will make extensive use of album art. Bubble caches album art, and you might like to discover how large that cache is (via Settings > Apps > Storage).

The time required to search a large cache for a fairly large number of images might be a factor. That can be tested by clearing the cache, which is arguably a good maintenance practice in any case. Of course, if you use a browse sequence requiring the retrieval of a large amount of album art from the server immediately after clearing the cache, that will tend to slow things down.

I use BubbleDS, which is similar to BubbleUPnP in most respects, and tend to narrow down my browsing range (for example using Genre > Composer > Composition) before getting an album list; that will, I suppose, limit the amount of album art Bubble needs to access and cache. When I had a Nexus 7 (also 16GB, and usually with less free space than you have), I didn't encounter any particular speed issues. My library is smaller than yours, but I'm not sure whether that is a relevant factor; my guess is that what matters is not the size of the dataset on the server, but the amount of data the control point actually has to access. Simon may, of course, be in a position to advise differently.

David

[tarnkappe]

" I have the 16 GB model, however the machine tells me I've used 3.7 GB of 12 GB! Would a larger memory improve matters?"
I did not mean the flash memory size. This is comparable to the hard disc size in a computer. I think the working memory (RAM) might be a topic. The nexus 7 from 2012 seems to have 1GB of RAM, the 2013 model 2GB. I think that 1GB might be critical, while 2GB might be enough. If you buy a new model, it probably will have 3 or 4 GB RAM. If it makes a difference you have to try.

Also a new tablet will have a much faster CPU. This could be relevant, too.

Another point is the speed of wifi, if the new model offers 5GHz wifi. (Your Router needs to support this, and the router must be near enough for 5GHz to work).

Also interesting is the speed of the NAS. I switched from a DS213+ to a DS418play and everything is working much faster. Minimserver already was very fast before and does not benefit so much, but a little bit, but many other things improofed much. So maybe this could be another way to speed up the listing.

Greetings
Gert

[simoncn]

Have you considered using alphagrouping for your albums? This will load a page containing selections for A, B, .... Z and this should be almost instant. You would then select one of these letters and this would load the albums starting with that letter, probably 10 times faster than loading the whole list. To enable this, set the alphaGroup property to 'albums' and restart MinimServer.

Another option (which can be used in combination with the above) is to add the following property settings:

1) Add a new tag Work to indexTags
2) In tagOptions, set Work.default={Album}

With these changes, you would select Work after Genre and this would load the same list that you have at present but without loading art images. This can be used as a test to see how much the art images are affecting your response time.

[DavidL]

(23-11-2017 23:02)DavidHB Wrote:  @DavidL

It's interesting that you describe a browse sequence which includes an albums listing, as that will make extensive use of album art. Bubble caches album art, and you might like to discover how large that cache is (via Settings > Apps > Storage).

The time required to search a large cache for a fairly large number of images might be a factor. That can be tested by clearing the cache, which is arguably a good maintenance practice in any case. Of course, if you use a browse sequence requiring the retrieval of a large amount of album art from the server immediately after clearing the cache, that will tend to slow things down.

I use BubbleDS, which is similar to BubbleUPnP in most respects, and tend to narrow down my browsing range (for example using Genre > Composer > Composition) before getting an album list; that will, I suppose, limit the amount of album art Bubble needs to access and cache. When I had a Nexus 7 (also 16GB, and usually with less free space than you have), I didn't encounter any particular speed issues. My library is smaller than yours, but I'm not sure whether that is a relevant factor; my guess is that what matters is not the size of the dataset on the server, but the amount of data the control point actually has to access. Simon may, of course, be in a position to advise differently.

David

Thanks DavidHB

I had 6900 files in the cache using 160MB of storage. Clearing this has dramatically improved the response time - I guess all of this cache is searched for relevant cover art. Mine may be a special situation as nearly all of the cover art I have is for Jazz, Popular and World music, with very little for classical music, so the search in the cache is likely to be a waste of time when classical music is requested.
David

[DavidL]

Thanks Simoncn and tarnkappe for your suggestions. As clearing the cache seems to have solved the problem I'll defer any other action.

David

[DavidHB]

(24-11-2017 08:09)simoncn Wrote:  Have you considered using alphagrouping for your albums? This will load a page containing selections for A, B, .... Z and this should be almost instant. You would then select one of these letters and this would load the albums starting with that letter, probably 10 times faster than loading the whole list. To enable this,

I do this and, as Simon says, it does work very quickly.

David