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[magnust]

My library is pretty big with 1784 album artists and 9400 albums.

I have an "Album Artist" view in Panel that shows up with the alphabet that is slow to load.

If I click one letter on this page the next page loads reasonably fast showing thumbnails for all the album artists on that letter. But when I click to go back to main Album Artists page showing the alphabet it takes a long long time before the thumbnails show again. And if I do it yet again there is no spead increase from caching or something.

Please look at the video of this:

https://youtu.be/wxPgJcwQWYc


Running current latest MC as server on:
- Intel Core i5-6400 and 8GB RAM
- Windows 7
- Gigabit network

Surf to Panel in latest Chrome on:
- Intel Core i7-4770 and 32GB RAM
- Windows 10

[Awesome Donkey]

Yeah, it's bound to happen with a large library - I encounter this myself when using Panel. Fortunately I can go into Panel's Settings > Advanced tab and set the Number of Items Per Page option from its default of 200 to something smaller (I use 24) and it works pretty well like that.

[magnust]

Thanks for the reply.

I tried reducing the number to 24 but since that only removed a few letters at the end of the alphabet nothing really improved.

Is there anything I can do to improve this when it comes to the Panel view settings in MC?

[Castius]

I had slow thumbnails as Well. It was related to my view. I had slow expressions.
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,115638.msg812159.html#msg812159

[magnust]

I had slow thumbnails as Well. It was related to my view. I had slow expressions.
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,115638.msg812159.html#msg812159

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. It's an ultra basic view (just show albumartists really...) but since it relates to the whole pile of music in one go which is pretty large, maybe there's a better way of setting it up? With half a minute wait each time at the main page for artists it's not very usable at all. Ask my family...

Anything I should change here:

[Castius]

I'm not sure but probably not.
I can say, that I agree with you.  panel is still to slow. The other apps that call the same server don't take nearly as long. So we know it should not be impossible to improve.

I have about 500 artists with 1000 albums. Useing the local network I waited 5-8 seconds for the first artist thumbnails to show up. Reducing the page to 20 items brought it down to about 1. But that really hurts the user experience.

[JimH]

Maybe 100 would be a reasonable compromise.

We may be able to improve the experience.   

[swiv3d]

Just run a comparison of Panel and JRemote using two different servers and Panel is as the original poster remarked inordinately slow - JRemote is showing the thumbnails without much of a delay and with a lot lower system resource usage than Panel. On my very underpowered Brix system the cpu is working at full thrust with Panel but only at 50% with JRemote whilst loading thumbnails. Using an ipad to get the information from the servers.

[Awesome Donkey]

Unlike JRemote, Panel has a "middle man" so-to-speak, the web browser. I'm guessing some web browsers might perform better than others when it comes to running Panel.

At least, that's what I'm thinking. I could be wrong though.

[JimH]

I think the difference is whether the thumbnails are cached or not.  I don't thing the browser adds much overhead.

[magnust]

I think the difference is whether the thumbnails are cached or not.  I don't thing the browser adds much overhead.

I'm with you on that, browser is not to blame. It seems the server (MC) doesn't cache either the thumbnails (which I would guess it actually does) or doesn't "cache" the calculation on what thumbnails to show (my bet is here  )

[JimH]

Or that MC can't create them.  You need to allow write access. 

[magnust]

How would that be? They do show up. Just takes a long time. Aaaah, are you thinking that the place where MC wants to place cache files is write protected so file caching is disabled that way, yeah that could be! Where are cached thumbnails for Panel stored so I can check if this is the root of my problem?

[JimH]

Check your options for everything under File Locations.

Search for thumb*.db

[magnust]

Proper write access on everything regarding MC, including these:

C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Cache
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Connected Library\Cache
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Cover Art  <<< cover art setting in MC. Directory is empty.
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Library\Cache
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Temp   <<< Temporary files setting in MC. Directory is empty.
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Thumbnails
C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Thumbnails\{4F5D1C43-0321-4FFF-A54E-B06655074163}\Normal (v3)


Searched including hidden files, only thumb*.db files on the whole system are in C:\Users\MagnusT\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer. All with write permissions for my user.


Still, that the page first shows up with the letters only, then it goes through letter by letter adding a number showing how many items are in it. And only after all are counted and numbers added to each it starts putting up the thumbs. To me it really sounds like it's the software code going through the database counting stuff that does this every time instead of caching the info with some "changed flag". And not working with parallell jobs either.


And it's not running on some minimal hardware box really (see first post)

[Manfred]

I played a little bit around with panel on my environments:

- On my old iPad4 + Safari as the browser panel is slow in building a view with ~400 thumbnails (you could count each build more or less)
- On my old iPad4 JRemote is fast ~1-3 sec for ~400 thumbnails (if you directly scroll to the end)
- On my i7 PC with 8 GB RAM + IE as the browser panel seems very fast, it took ~1 sec for ~400 thumbnails

[magnust]

I played a little bit around with panel on my environments:

- On my old iPad4 + Safari as the browser panel is slow in building a view with ~400 thumbnails (you could count each build more or less)
- On my old iPad4 JRemote is fast ~1-3 sec for ~400 thumbnails (if you directly scroll to the end)
- On my i7 PC with 8 GB RAM + IE as the browser panel seems very fast, it took ~1 sec for ~400 thumbnails

But my "Artists" page takes half a minute for just the alphabet + a few digits, 32 thumbnails total. It seems it goes through every album in the whole database every time?

[BradATIMA]

With these slow pages, is it loading the thumbnails slowly one at a time, or is there a long pause in the beginning followed by the thumbnails appearing more quickly?

[magnust]

With these slow pages, is it loading the thumbnails slowly one at a time, or is there a long pause in the beginning followed by the thumbnails appearing more quickly?

First no thumbnails show up at all for 30 seconds. Then they start showing up one by one. And this happens every time I get to that page. Some setting somewhere that should be different? I don't know.


Check this screen video:

https://youtu.be/hRWNwMxIhb4

[JimH]

Did you try setting Panel to display 50 at a time?

[magnust]

Did you try setting Panel to display 50 at a time?

Yupp! Nothing changed.

Maybe because there are only thirty thumbnails visible regardless setting?

[JimH]

Mine displays in about 5 seconds, showing 200 covers in Artists.

Something is odd though.  Your screenshot above is different.  No volume control, for example.  No alphabet at the top.  Your artists are labelled A, B, etc.

What version of MC are you connecting to?

[magnust]

Mine displays in about 5 seconds, showing 200 covers in Artists.

Something is odd though.  Your screenshot above is different.  No volume control, for example.  No alphabet at the top.  Your artists are labelled A, B, etc.

What version of MC are you connecting to?

24.0.60

There's a volume control in my screenshot but in the video it's further down, outside what's visible in the video. No line with the alphabet though, the thumbnails are the alphabet. But I'm very curious how your screen looks. Do you know any thread here which already has a screenshot in it that I can look at?

All my Panel views are copies of the views I have in my desktop standard view and Theatre view. So I get the same way of browsing my music regardless where I am browsing it. So the album artist view in panel is this ~sort=[Album Artist],[Track #]. I can't find grouping in the view settings in there anywhere, maybe that is the problem, that should be done differently? But how?



EDIT: Here's the pic I posted earlier in the thread: