[mythtv] Slow MythMusic (and likely other slow list building)
problem solved
Ed Benckert
ed at ebonmists.com
Tue Mar 2 12:39:46 EST 2004
After much tracking through code, I found out why MythMusic is so goddamned
slow to get past the "Please Wait..." screen when you try to play music.
When you enter that screen, it builds your list of songs, then assigns them
numbers to sort by... normal sorting is just the order they appear, random
sorting is just totally random, and INTELLIGENT SORTING sorts them based on
some algorithm.
Well, if ya'll remember, in the MythMusic setup screen you can set those
numbers that the intelligent sorting uses. Those numbers are stored in your
MySQL database.
For some reason, when building your tree/list, Myth asks the database what
those numbers are FOR EVERY SONG IN THE LIST.
The reason why it takes me so long to start up at home is my MySQL server is
on a different machine that my Myth frontend... so for each of my 1800
songs, every time I enter the play music screen, it asks the MySQL server:
What's the # for the weight for the song's Rating?
What's the # for the weight for the song's Play Count?
What's the # for the weight for the song's Last Play?
What's the # for the weight for random sorting?
So for me, thats 7200 SEPERATE MySQL select statements JUST to show me my
play list. I didnt look at the code enough to see if the connection to MySQL
is held open by MythTv... if it's trying to be "clean" and close the
connection after every call, it's opening a connection, issuing a select,
then closing the connection 7200 times for 1800 songs. Someone just posted
on the users list that they have 40gb of songs... my 1800 is 6gb, so a rough
estimate is he has about 12,000 songs. Thats 48,000 select statements, and
since he's on an Xbox, chances are good his MySQL is local... if it were on
another machine it'd take a month to get the playlist up.
The core problem here is those 4 paramaters need to be loaded ONLY ONCE when
MythMusic starts... you cannot even edit those numbers from within
MythMusic, you need to quit out and go to Settings->Music to even change
them. So instead of loading them once when it starts, it loads them once for
every song you have EVERY time you go into the play music screen, or go back
to it from the 'Edit Playlist' option from the Play Music screen.
So, how do you fix it?
Well, the first issue is that it doesnt need to ask every time. If you're a
code techie, go into metadata.cpp in the mythmusic source, and change how
the GetNumSettings are loaded. I'll be doing that in a minute and will have
a patch available shortly. What's the procedure here for submitting a patch?
The second issue is that GetSettings is broken. It asks MySQL EVERY time
it's called. Thats totally unnecessary. I'm positive it likely slows the
shit out of MythTv in every module that uses it... if MythMusic calls it
unnecessarily 7200 times, then I'm sure MythTv does it somehow also. How it
SHOULD work is there should be an internal array/tree/whatever kept in
memory with all the settings in it. When SaveSetting is called to update the
setting in the DB, that setting in the array should be cleared out. When
GetSetting is called again, if the entry in the array is empty, get it from
the database, otherwise, just return whats in the array. That I'll work on
later though...
Anyway, thats the problem and the fix. I'll have a patch shortly... just
need to know how to submit it and where...
More information about the mythtv-dev
mailing list