Rescan Speed

[mike963]

I am using Minserver 2 on a Synology with a largish library

Is it possible to speed up the rescan by for example using a list that I provide that contains all the files/folders that have changed since last rescan

the usecase I have in mind is that when I add a single new album - or just a new or updated playlist - minimserver takes several minutes to perform an update

I assume if minimserver knew which files had changed - particularly if it was just a single album or playlist then this could be much quicker

Any thoughts

Best wishes

Mike

[tarnkappe]

Hello Mike,

how large is your largish library? Mine is about 69000 tracks and 6500 albums. And I always wonder how fast a rescan of minimserver is. It only takes a few seconds on a DS814play.

Gert

[mike963]

Hi Gert

9435 albums - 137000 tracks mostly flacs and HD flacs - not sure if that makes a difference
if I add 1 album or 1 playlist - rescan takes over 3 minutes - ok - but tedious
DS814play is faster than DS415play of course but I thought limiting factor would be the disc access

I like to create new playlists regularly - looking at creating them on playback device directly (Moode on a RP4) but not easy

Thanks for the comment as always useful to check issues

[Peter StreamMagic]

(27-04-2021 09:15)mike963 Wrote:  Hi Gert

9435 albums - 137000 tracks mostly flacs and HD flacs - not sure if that makes a difference
if I add 1 album or 1 playlist - rescan takes over 3 minutes - ok - but tedious
DS814play is faster than DS415play of course but I thought limiting factor would be the disc access

I like to create new playlists regularly - looking at creating them on playback device directly (Moode on a RP4) but not easy

Thanks for the comment as always useful to check issues

Is your startupscan value set to "full" in Properties?

[mike963]

no - set to false

[Peter StreamMagic]

(27-04-2021 10:43)mike963 Wrote:  no - set to false

Mine is set to true maybe that makes a difference

[tarnkappe]

from https://minimserver.com/ug-properties.html

If set to true (the default), MinimServer does a complete library scan when it is started. If set to full, this scan ignores any existing cache files. If set to false, no library scan is done when MinimServer is started. See the Reading audio files section for details.

[simoncn]

I would like to improve the performance of rescanning a single file or folder. This is not as simple as it might seem because of the way MinimServer rescanning works.

A rescan requires the server to restart and rebuild its internal metadata for the entire library. Even if only one file is changed or added, all the internal metadata is rebuilt. There are some technical reasons for why it is done this way but I won't go into these here.

For a small or medium-sized library, this doesn't matter too much. The worst case is a large library with a very small number of changed files.

If it takes 3 minutes to do the rescan, this is about the same time as it takes to play a song. You can start a song and then start the rescan. The song will continue to play while the rescan is happening. By the time the song has finished, your new playlist should be available.

[mike963]

Thanks for the detailed answer and I can see that the meta data issues causes the problem in my limited use case

Very impressed with speed of searching and general browsing including the new ways to handle folder images

Many thanks for a great application

Mike

[simoncn]

Thanks for your understanding. I am hoping to improve the speed of the use case you have described but this will require major redesign of some of the Minimserver internals with careful thought to ensure it doesn't affect browsing speed or memory usage.