PDA

View Full Version : Improve Performance of Active and Smart Playlists



steppinwolf
12-09-2010, 11:28 PM
Some active and smart playlists--including built-in playlists such as "All Photo Files"--take a long time to open when they contain many files. Based on how long it takes, I'm guessing a SQL query is run each time. This makes the playlist smart or dynamic, but slow with large collections.

Using Views instead of queries should improve performance dramatically since the result set is stored and only refreshed as needed.

Paul
12-10-2010, 08:44 AM
The SQL query itself is usually very quick, it's the creation/loading of graphic thumbnails to display them on screen what takes the most time. Keeping those in memory would be costly RAM-wise, but we're constantly looking at way to optimize performance, so thank you for the suggestion!

dwurf
12-15-2010, 04:42 PM
Is it possible to add a setting like "List files at the bottom-level playlist only for active playlists on connected devices" to Media Sever Settings dialog box?

Paul
12-16-2010, 08:52 AM
Can you please describe in a bit more detail what that setting should do? Thanks!

dwurf
12-16-2010, 11:04 AM
Can you please describe in a bit more detail what that setting should do? Thanks!

For example, I have an Active playlist "Genre->Artist->Album" and 10 albums with 100 songs in total for some artist. On top-level folder everything is great because only artist's names are displayed. But on next sub-level (Artist) I will see 10 folders followed by 100 songs and this will take a time to load all songs. Not very a lot of time but it's much faster to load albums names only.

For all my Active playlist I know for sure that I want to see files on the bottom level only so this option will help me.

As an alternative I'd like to have an option in Active playlist properties like "List files starting from %LEVEL% only" with opportunity to point to any level in this Active playlist.

Thanks!

Paul
12-16-2010, 11:07 AM
Ok, I understand. I'll make a note of it to implement in a future release - thanks for the suggestion!

steppinwolf
12-27-2010, 11:40 AM
Is it possible to add a setting like "List files at the bottom-level playlist only for active playlists on connected devices" to Media Sever Settings dialog box?

dwurf, your question seems completely unrelated to the topic of this thread. Any particular reason you posted it here?