Large Music Library Navigation sluggishness on Raspberry Pi 3

1st Official Post

    I'm running LE 8.1.1 on a Raspberry Pi 3 using a 64gB Samsung Evo+ U3. I have the SD interface overclocked to 83.333MHz.

    I have >50k FLAC files in my music library. I don't have any other libraries on it. The UI is fairly responsive until I start navigating my way into the music section. Then it's sluggish with waiting. Like when I pick artists I get the circular throbber as it's doing something for a few seconds before I get the list. Going up one menu level and back into artists results in a similar delay.

    LE on my Chromebox doesn't have anything like these pauses with the exact same music library.

    Is there anything that can be done to minimize these pauses like increasing disk caching or tweaking some parameters?

    • Official Post

    RPi hardware is a little fantastic miracle from a price/performance perspective and its ability to "hardware decode" 1080p video etc. but this is all about CPU and I/O from accessing the DB file. Your Chromebox has ~20x the CPU grunt of the RPi3 and probably uses higher spec/speed flash for the internal storage which is why it has no visible I/O issues. 50k FLAC files tells me you're really into your audio and quality.. so it's time to do the collection justice and get a second Chromebox (or similar).

    Quote from chewitt

    RPi hardware is a little fantastic miracle from a price/performance perspective and its ability to "hardware decode" 1080p video etc. but this is all about CPU and I/O from accessing the DB file. Your Chromebox has ~20x the CPU grunt of the RPi3 and probably uses higher spec/speed flash for the internal storage which is why it has no visible I/O issues. 50k FLAC files tells me you're really into your audio and quality.. so it's time to do the collection justice and get a second Chromebox (or similar).

    Yes, but the Chromebox has a fan. Is it the "disk" (SD card) I/O subsystem that's the bottleneck or the CPU? An Odroid C2 with eMMC solves the disk I/O subsystem side of the equation, but doesn't have that much more CPU grunt than an RPi3.

    Quote from grael

    For music, I don't use tv screen to browse on my Pi.

    I use yatse on an android tablet, much smoother and efficient.

    I use Yatse also. It is definitely much, much more responsive. It's pretty rare that I try to navigate the music library via a keyboard or remote, but I'd like to speed it up if possible for those times. However, an Android Tablet or phone has a similar CPU to the RPi3 yet is also much more responsive with the same music library database to parse...

    To close the loop should anyone stumble across this thread in the future... This is a CPU limitation, not a disk I/O limitation. I recently received an Odroid C2 and it is only slightly faster than the RPi 3 in navigating the music library. eMMC vs. uSD makes no difference in the C2 in this regard. The Odroid C2 is only about as much faster as you'd expect for a 1.5gHz CPU vs. 1.2gHz. The Chromebox is slightly more twice as fast as the Odroid C2 (takes a little less than half the time for the artist or album list to appear).