Library rescan takes 1.5 hours

[odonnell]

I have a very large library on a detachable USB disk. About 685G (but that includes some stuff that isn't music). Mixxx takes about 1.5 hours to rescan, so I can't do that very often. Presumably something faster is possible. I do an rsync to an even larger file space in a few minutes.

There is a sort of workaround by browsing to bring in selected portions of the library. I have another problem with that (will post separately). So, a workaround not involving the browser would help me.

Thanks,

Mike O'Donnell
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell

[rryan]

Hi there,

We are working on an improvement in scan speed for Mixxx 1.11. There's a patch available here if you build from source and need a quick fix:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/966963

However, I'm not sure if this will solve your speed issues as I think we have a variety of hot-spots in the scanner code that need some love and this may not fix the particular bottleneck you are hitting.

[odonnell]

Thanks for the quick tip, even before I remembered to mention that I'm running Mixxx 1.10.0 on Xubuntu Oneiric.

I'm generally knowledgable about computing and Linux applications, but I haven't yet tried using a patch. I assume that this is a patch to the source code, requiring recompiling. I will probably stay out of that (I have another note posted regarding a workaround).

If you particularly need people to try the patch, and want to write or point to instructions, I can push myself toward a more sophisticated participation.

I also doubt that your patch affects my problem. It appears that Mixxx is inspecting every sub*directory in my library space, and the disk seeks are probably eating up the time. A faster rescan for me probably depends on a more sophisticated way of avoiding unchanged areas.

My problem suggests the value of a partial rescan feature---point to a subdirectory and rescan only that. I found such a feature on Rhythmbox. There seems to be a workaround to get that result through the File Browser, but I have another problem there, and anyway it's natural for a user to look for partial rescan in a submenu to the rescan function.

Cheers,

Mike O'D.