Performance issue or user misunderstanding?? (2 Viewers)

[lulsam]

All right, after some testing and research, I think I finally understood the behaviour of MP regarding Pictures and performance. Here are my findings just if anybody can take advantage of them:

First time a pictures folder is accessed, MP creates thumbnails in Thumbs\Pictures subfolder to speed up some viewing modes like "icons", big "icons" and "slide". Two interesting points here:

• The quality of the thumbs is controlled in MP Setup in General -> Thumbnails
• That's fine for pictures (files) but folders follow a different approach: Thumbnails have to be created manually within MP by pushing the button create thumbnails in the left menu. This action creates a hidden file named folder.jpg for each one (notice that regular windows explorer can display the thumbs for directories as well in "thumbnails mode" => great). Two issues here:
  
  [*]2.1. The "folder thumbs" are not cached in the Thumbs\Pictures subfolder as the ones for files => I think they should be, specially valuable for those like me that are using a file server to store the media files => MP improvement
  [*]2.2. While viewing directories in "list mode" the thumbs are displayed and I think they only should be displayed in the other viewing modes (icons, big icons and slide) like happens with the picture files, and following exactly the same bahaviour of windows explorer. In my opinion this seems to be a MP bug / improvement suggestion​

I think the best is to open a new post in improvement and link this one to it

Best regards

 

[mbuzina]

No I've had problems listing photos as well. I gave up on it as it was dragging so much ass. As soon as you open the directory, MP tries to generate thumbnails for every image in there. There's no picture "database" like there is for videos or music, so my guess is that it has to do this every time you reconnect to the shared drive (aka restart).

Is it that true? Seems a weird approach to generate the full list of thumbs each time it reads the directory contents. It should do some kind of timestamp checking and generate just the thumbs required.

Anyway, I don't know, and this is the point. We need some developer help to understand how MP works here and find out is there is something wrong or not

Please, is there any developer out there??

Best regards

That is not true. The Thumbnails are generated and stored in the MOP Dir/Thumbs/Pictures folder on the local machine (go & have a look, you will find each picture you'd ever browsed 2 time, large & small). But please remember, the client / server environment is still new to MP (with the TV Engine 3 esp.). So I guess that there will be a need to change this behaviour. I already tried to delve in using microsofts thumbs.db file (which caches thumbnails for MS Explorer), but I have a few difficulties (In XP this works, but Vista does things differently & I could not find a way to tell windows to start generating the thumbnails).

I guess the biggest issue in performance, is that the MP Client will load each photo in your directory to the client, then save 2 thumbnails locally. When this is done, browsing should be quicker.

A better solution (for the future) would be: The server generates the thumbnails in a background process (best would be to use the same thumbs that the OS uses, but otherwise use local thumbs) and then to server them with it's own protocol to the client. I started working on a real pictures db a while ago (I wanted to sort my pics by date taken instead of file browsing), but I am not finished an my time for this is almost gone (2 children, new house, new project for job...). So if there are other devs what want to continue, I can basically give some ideas input (and maybe some old code) and just a little time.

Who whants to join?

 

[mbuzina]

All right, after some testing and research, I think I finally understood the behaviour of MP regarding Pictures and performance. Here are my findings just if anybody can take advantage of them:

First time a pictures folder is accessed, MP creates thumbnails in Thumbs\Pictures subfolder to speed up some viewing modes like "icons", big "icons" and "slide". Two interesting points here:

• The quality of the thumbs is controlled in MP Setup in General -> Thumbnails
• That's fine for pictures (files) but folders follow a different approach: Thumbnails have to be created manually within MP by pushing the button create thumbnails in the left menu. This action creates a hidden file named folder.jpg for each one (notice that regular windows explorer can display the thumbs for directories as well in "thumbnails mode" => great). Two issues here:
  
  [*]2.1. The "folder thumbs" are not cached in the Thumbs\Pictures subfolder as the ones for files => I think they should be, specially valuable for those like me that are using a file server to store the media files => MP improvement
  [*]2.2. While viewing directories in "list mode" the thumbs are displayed and I think they only should be displayed in the other viewing modes (icons, big icons and slide) like happens with the picture files, and following exactly the same bahaviour of windows explorer. In my opinion this seems to be a MP bug / improvement suggestion​

I think the best is to open a new post in improvement and link this one to it

Best regards

Also true, this might slow down browsing even more. This will slow down browsing for all other media types as well (get Dir, check if Dir/floder.jpg exists, load it...). Again this should maybe covered by a dedicated MP server with db.

 

[lulsam]

Also true, this might slow down browsing even more. This will slow down browsing for all other media types as well (get Dir, check if Dir/floder.jpg exists, load it...). Again this should maybe covered by a dedicated MP server with db.

Probably you are right and the best approach is to have a dedicated MP Server, and in my opinion this server should have not only a pictures db, but an integrated media db where MP will become a full media streaming server. I am not saying that the media should be inside the db, because depending on the RDBMS this could drive performance issues, probably the media could be in a file system and the media metadata in the db, but this is something to be discussed later.

Unfortunately, taken into account the huge effort currently ongoing for TV Server probably this approach will take a while to evaluate, design and even more time to develop and test.

Regarding the idea of having cached copies of any thumb, files and directories, I feel this is extremely valuable not only in the short term (AFAIK I an not the only one using a file server box separate from the MP box) but also for the "far future" of a streaming server, because optimizing the network traffic is becoming a must even in a controlled environment like a home lan.

Best

 

[doubleu]

lulsam, i almost have that same exact setup (asus nforce 430/geforce 6100/2gb ddr/onboard lan) and I cannot play videos via my network (i have to copy them to the htpc's hard drive first, then they'll play flawlessly.) The most peculiar thing I've seen is when I'm copying a movie to said htpc from my main pc. If mediaportal is running, a 1.5gb movie is reported to take 90 minutes to copy (100mpbs network). The instant I shut mediaportal down, it jumps down to 15 minutes. I haven't yet thrown a different nic in there to see what happens.

 

[aal]

I cannot believe that I am the only one with this kind of set up (file server and media portal as a client) and / or performance issue.

Is it true? Am I the only one?

Nope, same here. I am using a NAS to store my media files, pictures included. Windows shares are awful for getting directory listings. Once the dir is loaded picture browsing is ok.

Directory browsing is instant while using FTP, but then i would need to download each and every picture manually which is not an option.

So, i'm stuck as well.

If MP could just fix the directory listing issue that would be great. Otherwise it is not usable for large photo collections.

An alternative would be to automatically download photos using FTP once a picture is selected (so do not ask for confirmation). Slideshows would have to download automatically as well. The end result would be an exact local copy of all pictures on the local disk, but although not ideal would also solve it for me.

 

[lulsam]

lulsam, i almost have that same exact setup (asus nforce 430/geforce 6100/2gb ddr/onboard lan) and I cannot play videos via my network (i have to copy them to the htpc's hard drive first, then they'll play flawlessly.) The most peculiar thing I've seen is when I'm copying a movie to said htpc from my main pc. If mediaportal is running, a 1.5gb movie is reported to take 90 minutes to copy (100mpbs network). The instant I shut mediaportal down, it jumps down to 15 minutes. I haven't yet thrown a different nic in there to see what happens.

I don't know what could happen with your setup, basically because I can play network video files with the HTPC (similar to your specs) and also with another PC much less powerful (Athlon XP 1.7+).

First try to determine where is the bottleneck. I suggest you to perform a couple of test, CPU and network load:

1.- While you are copying the file locally, open the task manager and check the CPU load: with MP and without MP running. Order the processes by CPU load and notice which ones higher CPU consumption. Do not forget to check also the CPU load on the file server side, sometimes there is the issue (in my case, a dedicated PCI NIC in the file server decreased the CPU load from 100% to 60% while serving heavy files with windows shares). I personally think that with 2 GB RAM the mem shouldn't be the issue so take a look just in case but.....
2.- Try to play the file remotely but with another client different from MP (BSplayer, VLC, whatever you prefer). I like VLC because it has the ability to display error messages in a window, for instance dropped frames. Test different networking situations like playing the file with windows shares, http / ftp server

Post here your findings. Regards

 

[lulsam]

I cannot believe that I am the only one with this kind of set up (file server and media portal as a client) and / or performance issue.

Is it true? Am I the only one?

Nope, same here. I am using a NAS to store my media files, pictures included. Windows shares are awful for getting directory listings. Once the dir is loaded picture browsing is ok.

Directory browsing is instant while using FTP, but then i would need to download each and every picture manually which is not an option.

So, i'm stuck as well.

If MP could just fix the directory listing issue that would be great. Otherwise it is not usable for large photo collections.

An alternative would be to automatically download photos using FTP once a picture is selected (so do not ask for confirmation). Slideshows would have to download automatically as well. The end result would be an exact local copy of all pictures on the local disk, but although not ideal would also solve it for me.

Good, I am not alone in the universe!!!

Actually I don't think 100% of the issue is because smb protocol, although I fully agree on ftp or http have less overhead. Just check this: how much time does it take to list the directories / files in regular windows explorer? For me it takes less that 1/10 than with MP!!!! . Check several mode views like thumbnails, icons, list and details to better understand how fast is your setup without MP working, and then you can determine how much delay is introducing MP by itself.

Probably there are some strategies that could be implemented to speed up the directory / file listing, but the MP developers has to chose the best one (I am not a .NET developer).

While somebody solves it, I share the workarrounds I did to optimize the directory listing:
1.- Re-order the directories (grouping them by years). Right now my longer subdirectory list has 28 elements, and MP displays it at aceptable speed
2.- Deleted any folder.jpg file to decrease network traffic (surprisingly this files are not locally cached) and time to load

Regards

 

[zamoth]

I have the same issue. I have somthing like 40 directories in my picture shared folder, and browsing inside may take 30 secondes from one folder to the other. While watching picture, I may have a 10 seconds delay to get from one slide to the other.

Network is not the probleme, I have a wired 100 Mb hub, and all my movies are stored on the same computer (and disk) than the picture ... I have no problem reading video files !

So there is something in the "my picture" plugin wich slows down the browsing ... But what ?

 

[tonyscha]

I will have to check out how fast mine is, I have serveral thousand pictures, with serveral gigs on my media center, buts its all local, I will let you know how that pans out