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[gpvillamil]

I'm currently using Media Center to manage a library of about 150GB of VBR MP3s, and 10GB of photographs. Performance is OK so far, very usable. Most noticeable delays occurr when calculating the content of playlist groups.

However, I was wondering just how far I can take it. If I continue ripping my CD collection at this rate I expect to have over 600GB of music, and my photos keep piling up as well.

So I was wondering:

1) Are there any design limits to Media Center, in terms of number of songs, images, storage being managed?

2) What are the largest libraries that have been tested?

3) What size libraries are people managing with MC9?

[jleerigby]

Mine's a mere 23K MP3s but word has it that Mr Sparta has a library of around 130K tracks.  I think JRiver have a copy of the library index that they use for testing.  Apparently he now uses a cut down version of the library that's about 23K tracks - all of which have charted somewhere sometime.  He'll no doubt be along soon to confirm this.

[gpvillamil]

Thanks! How is overall performance with that amount of files? Is there any special management process/grooming/cleanup required? I'm thinking of how Outlook needs to have its mailbox cleaned up and compacted periodically.

[kiwi]

I'd also be interested in whether or not it makes a difference as to what types of files are in the library.  i.e.  Is it just a raw count of the files that really makes the difference.  Or, do you get better/worse performance with 10k APEs v. 10k MP3s, etc.

kiwi

[jleerigby]

Thanks! How is overall performance with that amount of files? Is there any special management process/grooming/cleanup required? I'm thinking of how Outlook needs to have its mailbox cleaned up and compacted periodically.

Performance is not an issue.  Panes refresh quickly / tag changes implement quickly etc.  Matt has done a lot of good work in recent builds to optimise MC's performance.

I don't do any special clean up process.  What's to clean up?  I don't muck around with my files outside of MC so the library never needs to be refreshed.  All my tag changes including cover art are saved inside the files.

I'd also be interested in whether or not it makes a difference as to what types of files are in the library.  i.e.  Is it just a raw count of the files that really makes the difference.  Or, do you get better/worse performance with 10k APEs v. 10k MP3s, etc.

All mine are MP3 CBR stored on a dedicated internal 250GB drive (Western Digital Caviar SE 8MB cache).  I don't know whether the speed of your hard drive or the locality of the files is critical to performance though.  No doubt RAM & CPU are - I'm running with 1.5GB DDR 333 RAM and XP2700+ TBred CPU.

There are so many factors that could affect performance so I guess we need Matt to come along and tell us what the principle ones are.

[LonWar]

As long as you keep the drive defragmented you will be ok.

And yes the speed of the drive does come in to play, Well the cache does.
an 8 mb cache drive is ALOT faster then a 2mb.

(Or at least I noticed a big gain)

[dragyn]

I'm currently at 145k and MC seems to be doing a good job considering my system is a POS.

[KingSparta]

1) Are there any design limits to Media Center, in terms of number of songs, images, storage being managed?

I had it upto 131,000 mp3's somthing you can't do with MusicMatch And RealJukebox\RealOne

2) What are the largest libraries that have been tested?

Mine

3) What size libraries are people managing with MC9?

my lib is about the same as dragyn's

[fex]

I'm currently at 145k and MC seems to be doing a good job considering my system is a POS.

Phewww. So I have some space left with my 17'000 tracks. Good to know.

[meehawl]

I'm currently hovering around 100K files online (in a RAID-5 x6 8MB 7200 RPM config).

I see extreme slowdown refreshing the panes in the Media Library when I am typing a keyword search.

i have 9.1.279. I plan on upgrading to 9.2.282 soon. I hope the refresh is faster on this version, because it's pretty unworkable on 279.

More here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=16133;start=msg109672#msg109672

[KingSparta]

I'm currently hovering around 100K files online (in a RAID-5 x6 8MB 7200 RPM config).

I see extreme slowdown refreshing the panes in the Media Library when I am typing a keyword search.

i have 9.1.279. I plan on upgrading to 9.2.282 soon. I hope the refresh is faster on this version, because it's pretty unworkable on 279.

More here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=16133;start=msg109672#msg109672

9.1.291 is a bit better than other versions since they fixed a few speed problems.

[lOth]

I had it upto 131,000 mp3's

wow king.
I guess that's why you wrote the party sampler plug-in!  

[KingSparta]

I guess that's why you wrote the party sampler plug-in!

no, not really.

someone asked me too

[meehawl]

9.1.291 is a bit better than other versions since they fixed a few speed problems.

I will give it a try. But upgrading the server (which does double duty as an IIS machine) and 6 clients is non-trivial, and often requires restarts (big no-no for the IIS machine). I prefer doing monthly refreshes of my software array.