Yet another fan art speed question

[bikesquid]

Love the new options of Gemstone.... it's great.... But...

I'm using banners on HD300 extenders and find it very slow on a page down to display the banners.... so two questions:

1 - What are the factors in banner load speed and what can I do to adjust/manage this better on my end? Do I need a SSD drive on the server as a cache point, etc? I've currently got the cache on the HD300 set to "10" but I don't know if thats better than 20, or 5 etc. Would love a break down of the settings and how best to achieve lickity-split speeds on the HD300 extenders.

2 - Is it possible for Gemstone to throw the text up first for all shows, not just the ones without banners and then go back and place the banners when they exist... I believe this is how daimond used to do it. That way the tiles wouldn't just be black boxes and I'd at least know if I was on the right page!

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by bikesquid

Love the new options of Gemstone.... it's great.... But...

I'm using banners on HD300 extenders and find it very slow on a page down to display the banners.... so two questions:

1 - What are the factors in banner load speed and what can I do to adjust/manage this better on my end? Do I need a SSD drive on the server as a cache point, etc? I've currently got the cache on the HD300 set to "10" but I don't know if thats better than 20, or 5 etc. Would love a break down of the settings and how best to achieve lickity-split speeds on the HD300 extenders.

2 - Is it possible for Gemstone to throw the text up first for all shows, not just the ones without banners and then go back and place the banners when they exist... I believe this is how daimond used to do it. That way the tiles wouldn't just be black boxes and I'd at least know if I was on the right page!

I don't know whether Gemstone is caching fanart to the HDD, because if it does then you could consider the RamDisk + Junction option to dramatically increase speed, click on the link in my signature for details.

Also, speed is very related to the size of your fanart file, there are lots of way to keep the files small without compromising on quality too much.

Eddy

[bikesquid]

Originally Posted by routerunner

I don't know whether Gemstone is caching fanart to the HDD, because if it does then you could consider the RamDisk + Junction option to dramatically increase speed, click on the link in my signature for details.

That's a good point, maybe one of the guys doing development can comment?

When I had to move the main fanart location Gemstone was shooting blanks till I told it where the fanart was, so maybe caching just isn't working for me on the HD300's? Of coarse with that said, clearing filesystem cache and rebuild does cause the GemstoneImages directory to clear... from the server client AND from the HD300, so what do I know.

I believe when using the client on the server they're stored under userdata/Phoenix/cache/Imagetrans/GemstoneImages

With that in mind I did try your ramdisk setup and it does seem to help when using the server's client, but from the HD300's any effect is pretty subtle....

I do still have questions about Gemstone min cache # and what that means.... image scaling and what those #'s are and if that's dynamic vs for building the cached images, etc.

[TwistedMelon]

The percentage numbers are mentioned here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59367

The percentages are based on the specified UI width.

Keep in mind that the maximum resolution for the HD300 UI is 1280x720 and it's only 1024x576 for HD200. PC-based clients don't have this limitation as far as I know and can be made to run at the full display resolution.

The cache "MININUM" setting means it will try to cache at least that number of items. I've found that with the HD200, even with a default setting of 10, no more than 5 posters are ever cached in memory. You can see this by scrolling through a text list while viewing poster in the program info. On the 6th one it will cause poster to be dumped from the cache. I'm also not sure if the cache purging is working properly. Try scrolling up and down over the same items until you see that you've hit one that needs to be loaded from disk. Example: scroll down 5 then back up 5. Then down 6 and back down six. Then 7, etc...

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

The cache "MININUM" setting means it will try to cache at least that number of items. I've found that with the HD200, even with a default setting of 10, no more than 5 posters are ever cached in memory. You can see this by scrolling through a text list while viewing poster in the program info. On the 6th one it will cause poster to be dumped from the cache. I'm also not sure if the cache purging is working properly. Try scrolling up and down over the same items until you see that you've hit one that needs to be loaded from disk. Example: scroll down 5 then back up 5. Then down 6 and back down six. Then 7, etc...

Close but this is not correct. Here is how it works....

There are 2 levels of Cache... the FileSystemCache and the MemoryCache which is a soft cache with a minimum. All fanart images are saved in the FileSystemCache no matter what the settings. All extenders, placeshifters and a client running on the server share the same FileSystemCache which is located here... "userdata\Phoenix\cache\imagetrans\GemstoneImages" on the server. All other PC clients have there own local FileSystemCache (same folder structure).

As long as the CacheType is not set to OFF then fanart from the FileSystemCache are loaded into a MemoryCache to increase performance. When Gemstone goes to grab a fanart item it will check the MemoryCache to see if it's already available there and use that item... otherwise it will get it from the FileSystemCache and also store it in the MemoryCache. If it is not in the FileSystemCache then it is created there etc.

As I said, the MemoryCache is a soft cache and the MINIMUM settings is the number of items that once cached will not be removed from the cache... so with the setting at 10 then once 10 fanart items are in the MemoryCache then there will always be 10 in the MemoryCache (unless you use the menu option to clear it). Java's memory handling will NOT remove these 10 either. Now these 10 items will be changed out with other fanart as they will be the most recently used/added items as well... but there will always be 10. So setting this number to a higher number ... say 100, will improve performance BUT will always use 100 images worth of heap memory (this was the default value prior to the last release which now uses 10). If the number is too high and too many extenders then the heap will fill quicker and cause other issues... so it is a balancing act... but I found 10 to be a good number to use. YMMV.

Now this does not mean that only 10 items are cached as that is really only the "hard" part of the soft cache. The cache can hold ANY number of fanart items and will remain in the cache as long as Java does not decide it needs some of the heap for other things... at that point, items in the MemoryCache other than the 10 can be removed by Java and then would need to be reloaded from the FileSystemCache if needed to be displayed again.

The pause mentioned by TwistedMelon after 5 items (or so) is only because the displaying of the fanart images is handled by a queue that is processed in the background to improve performance and not interupt the scrolling of the items in the Flows. The MemoryCache likely has no issues holding 100's of fanart items as I see on my HD300 when using a wall flow... after you have scrolled through the wall flow once you can quickly scroll up and down in the wall and the fanart loads instantly.

I hope that helps (and not just cloud) the way Gemstone handles fanart.

k

[bikesquid]

That helps explain how the cache works, Thanks for the thorough answer,... what I can do to get better performance on my setup... as I'm only using banners, the file sizes are pretty small, so I can't imagine cache is the limiting factor.? But I do have a large # of files, upwards of 900 different TV shows at the main level, so page down/up's take a while. I'm trying to understand the best tweaks I can do to improve the performance... again using HD300's exclusively... I'm finding gemstone much slower than diamond at the moment.

[jorton]

Are you using the flows or the default TV views with banners turned on?

[bikesquid]

Originally Posted by jorton

Are you using the flows or the default TV views with banners turned on?

I'm using the new flows, I've tried higher min cache #, lower min cache #, etc.

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

The pause mentioned by TwistedMelon after 5 items (or so) is only because the displaying of the fanart images is handled by a queue that is processed in the background to improve performance and not interupt the scrolling of the items in the Flows.

I'm setting up a PC-based client right now so that I can compare to the HD200 and HD300 - it's smaller than the HD200 but has a fan, and so far seems an order of magnitude faster in terms of UI responsiveness.

The issue I mentioned was noted on the HD200 and I've yet to see what it's like on the HD300. However, when I noticed it, I didn't need to scroll quickly. After moving about 5 items in the list I could leave the current item select for at least a few seconds (probably minutes) and simply moving to the next item would cause the image to (appear to) reload. I'll check this out in more detail and report back exactly what I see so that you can verify if it's expected/correct behavior or if you think something might be going wrong.

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by bikesquid

That helps explain how the cache works, Thanks for the thorough answer,... what I can do to get better performance on my setup... as I'm only using banners, the file sizes are pretty small, so I can't imagine cache is the limiting factor.? But I do have a large # of files, upwards of 900 different TV shows at the main level, so page down/up's take a while. I'm trying to understand the best tweaks I can do to improve the performance... again using HD300's exclusively... I'm finding gemstone much slower than diamond at the moment.

I recommend you wait for the next release as I have made changes to the settings around caching that were certainly causing issues and I have an issue I need to look at yet that was around displaying banners....

As well... I feel the current Sage Flow in "banner" mode was not really the right solution so I think we will be designing a new banner based flow when we get around to it.

k

[bikesquid]

The client on the server is definitely quicker... how much quicker is hard to tell, but quicker. I've set the min cache at 900 *gasp and set info options to gemstone info alwayson and info style to simple,... that seems to have sped things up quite a bit too, but I'm still seeing what's essentially instant on the server takes 2+ seconds on the HD300.... with the same config as far as I can tell.

[TwistedMelon]

Quick semi-related question. What do I have to do to a PC-client to get the various artwork to come up? This is a stand-alone PC-client, not the server-based client. My server is headless and does server-only duties.

On top of the Sage client software I've installed only Gemstone (which said client version) and then made some view changes to line up with those on my extenders. None of the posters nor per-episode fanart are coming up.

[bikesquid]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

Quick semi-related question. What do I have to do to a PC-client to get the various artwork to come up? This is a stand-alone PC-client, not the server-based client. My server is headless and does server-only duties.

On top of the Sage client software I've installed only Gemstone (which said client version) and then made some view changes to line up with those on my extenders. None of the posters nor per-episode fanart are coming up.

This is possibly due to UNC file path access issues.... When the fanart isn't findable by the client gemstone shoots blanks. Try modifying the fanart location to be unc rather than drive letter, and make sure your sage client is logged in with appropriate rights.

[bikesquid]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

I recommend you wait for the next release as I have made changes to the settings around caching that were certainly causing issues and I have an issue I need to look at yet that was around displaying banners....

As well... I feel the current Sage Flow in "banner" mode was not really the right solution so I think we will be designing a new banner based flow when we get around to it.

k

Sounds good, will wait. Just so you're aware, the client on the server running the same configuration is really quick, it's just the HD300's that seem lagging and slow.

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by bikesquid

This is possibly due to UNC file path access issues.... When the fanart isn't findable by the client gemstone shoots blanks. Try modifying the fanart location to be unc rather than drive letter, and make sure your sage client is logged in with appropriate rights.

Good advice. Where (specifically) do I make the changes though? Do I do this through the Gemstone UI settings on the server? Do it on the client? Both?

It'd be super-nice if the client picked everything up from the server in a similar fashion to the way the Extenders do.

I've verified that sharing properties are such that I can access the server's SageTV paths, including fanart/caches from the client via Explorer.

[bikesquid]

If you get file not found when trying to play a show you'll have to make your import paths (sage setup on server) unc, you'll have to make the fanart folder unc (I think you can do this via the options in gemstone,... look for options, image options, fanart folder... can't think of anything else from the client, but shout if it doesnt work. good luck. I believe this will need to be set per client/extender/etc.

[TwistedMelon]

I'll give it a shot on the client tomorrow. The Extenders all work fine right now. And the PC-client can play anything that SageTV has recorded, it's just fanart that doesn't show up. I don't have any imported media added to Sage yet.

Oh.... Just thought of something. Should I also have installed Phoenix on the client manually? I need to check that plus if for some reason the Phoenix fanart option needs to be turned on at the client (as opposed to just turning it on at the server).

[jusjoken]

In the PC client image options turn on fanart and set the fanart folder to a network reachable location where the fanart is on the server.

Then if it doesn't work restart the client and try again.

k

[Fuzzy]

After years of trying out different systems, clients, hd300's, etc, I've settled on the conclusion that a lot of ram and a good cache is the best system. I run a 4GB fancy cache on my server, and 2GB on each client. Fanart is incredibly fast. I, in the past used a ramdrive, and it was marginally faster, but not enough to offset the setup and resync times.

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I run a 4GB fancy cache on my server, and 2GB on each client. Fanart is incredibly fast.

Sounds intriguing. Implementation details?

This product? http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/f...che/index.html

How much memory do you have on the server? How much on the PC-clients?

I've only got 4GB on the server and it also serves music via Squeezebox Server (LMS) plus a few other miscellaneous tasks ever now and then. I could conceivably bump that up though - I'm pretty sure I've got a few empty dimm sockets. On the PC-client I've also got 4GB, which would be plenty a Sage would be the only thing it does.