FASTER music/movie browsing and DB access (1 Viewer)

[LaPistola]

How big is the whole media portal install? I would think with enough ram.. you could rock!

I have a gig of ram.. would that be enough?

 

[htpcNoob]

I have a gig of ram.. would that be enough?

It all depends on whats you have on your running in the background while using MP. 1GB should be enough IMHO to create a large enough ramdisk to put an entire installation of MP on a RAMDISK and still have enought memory to operate. I have 512MB of ram on my DEDICATED HTPC and my mem usage on average peaks at about 475MB. 80MB for of the memory is for a ramdrive. This maybe different for regular users. My HTPC has been tweaked heavily to the point where I went apesh*t on keeping installation size to a minimum and determining what services/app run in the backgroun. (Mostly in part due to nLite. Check it out @ http://nuhi.msfn.org/). It is hard to create a RAMDISK over 128MB of ram with system instability. Ramdisk require contiguous allocation of memory address space.

Here are some 2 tips to keeping MP installation small:
- Delete/backup unnecessary skins
- The database schema in MP is constantly being improved and makes database files (in the "database" folder) obsolete. You can delete old versions if you notice multiple database files in the MP after updating and importing. Eg: In the database folder if you have files musicdatabase4.db and musicdatabase5.db, you can delete musicdatabase4.db. Make sure all the data from previous versions of the DB were imported first. Usually if the size of the new database is greater than or equal to the previous database, that means the previous versions data was most likely imported (i think the importing is done automatically after new installations. Not sure).

You will have to manage your ramdisk carefully when considering its size which will be affected by the sizes of database and thumbnails. I dont use EPG as i have an STB from my cable provider with EPG so that drastically reduces my database size. Thumbnails for "My Pictures" are exteremly large as well since they are of higher quality. This is why I only keep thumbnails of Music Albums and Movie Titles on the ramdrive.
These thumbnails are between 5KB-32KB. MP often downloads multiple images of different sizes of the same video.

Before allocating space, i did some calculations to see what size of a ramdrive would suit my needs. I did some guesswork with the sizes of the database and thumbnails based on the number of thumbnails i had and the sizes of the database:
Database size for info on 5000 mp3's: ~700KB
Database size for info on 100 movies: ~300KB
Average thumbnail image size: ~25KB

Based on this I calculated the size of my RamDrive so that I wouldnt have to worry about it anytime soon.

Hope this helps.

 

[rtv]

*double post deleted*

 

[rtv]

What Ramdisk-Driver did you finally choose to extend the Ramdisk further than 32MB?

 

[htpcNoob]

The development for this has stopped but it allows for Ramdisk sizes of up to 2GB
http://www.arsoft-online.com/index....&catid=14&order=dmdate_published&ascdesc=DESC


Use this following if you plan on using ramdisks <= 64MB as it is more stable:
http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/W-P/system/devicedriverdevelopment/article.php/c5789/

 

[rtv]

The latter I use here..

What exactly do you mean with unstable? Does your system freeze sometimes using the first driver?

 

[SpaceProtector]

To answer the question some posts ago: I have the complete xmltv dir in the RAM. I grab the tvguide.xml on a different computer and copy it on the htpc afterwards as I do not have an internet connection. I deleted all unnecessary files therefore. (like the docs).

 

[htpcNoob]

The latter I use here..

What exactly do you mean with unstable? Does your system freeze sometimes using the first driver?

Unstable when creating a large Ramdisk. Say.. 128MB. As i mentioned that Ramdisk must allocate contiguous memory in order to create a ramdisk. Just like a hard disk, memory becomes fragmented when loading/unloading applications (even at boot time) and trying to allocate 128MB of contiguous ram space could fail and cause a BSOD.

 

[fpouels]

The link for the junction utility at the top of this usefull post did not work for me, the utility was found on

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Junction.html

 

[mzemina]

The latter I use here..

What exactly do you mean with unstable? Does your system freeze sometimes using the first driver?

Unstable when creating a large Ramdisk. Say.. 128MB. As i mentioned that Ramdisk must allocate contiguous memory in order to create a ramdisk. Just like a hard disk, memory becomes fragmented when loading/unloading applications (even at boot time) and trying to allocate 128MB of contiguous ram space could fail and cause a BSOD.

But can't you defrag a ramdisk just like a regular harddisk?