Serviio

G'day,

I'm not sure if Serviio already does this or not, but I've been noticing that if I am playing a video on my WDTV and Serviio starts looking for new files it churns the drive and causes stuttering in my playback. What I am requesting is the ability to either limit the rate at which Serviio hunts for updates, or to update only when not streaming media. In the interim I've disabled automatic updating, but I typically rely on the feature as I have programmes appearing on my drive 'automagically'.

Regards,

Smidge.

You could turn off the check for updates to files so that serviio only looks for new files (Library and untick seach for updates to currently shared files). In the future once Java 7 is used, the OS will notify serviio when files have been added so the process should be much less intensive.

Cheers for the response,

I've been running with all library updating turned off for a week now and it was definitely the culprit causing my video streams to stutter. Do you know if the Java 7 API will notify about all file system changes (i.e. creation, deletion, rename etc)?

For now I'll just remember to press the force refresh button every so often, and Serviio continues to be absolutely rock solid. Cheers for the advice.

Yes, but it doesn't work for network drives so zip is writing a custom implementation somewhere between what we have now and what java 7 supports so that it will be the same accross all types of folders.

Will simply using Java7 enable this, or is there still server side work to be done?

(If it makes any difference, I'm using the OpenJDK version of Java7 on Ubuntu 11.10 and Serviio 0.6.2)

Using java 7 wouldn't automatically enable it, but as I said, because it only works for local drives, and not network drives, it won't be used and something in between what we have now and what java 7 supports for local drives will be used. This is so that is is consistant accross local and network folders. At least, that is the current plan as far as I know.

Any idea in timescales? I'm trying to work out if it's worth sticking with my current solution until serviio supports file monitoring, or if I need to look elsewhere (I have about 40K files across nearly 1K directories so timed scans put too much of a load on the server and it's disks).

Its planned for Serviio 1.0, zip will comment on the exact timeframe, but something like a month for the first beta+/-a week or two, and then a few months of testing before the final release. Once the beta is out, you would be more than welcome to join the beta testers group and test out the performance improvements made.

Thanks. I'll keep an eye on the RSS feed for the arrival of 1.0 and go play with some other options in the meantime.

The new file monitoring is not planned for 1.0 at this time.

Ok sorry, my mistake.

In that case a hack to limit the rate at which Serviio scans would be greatly appreciated. If I had access to the source I'd have patched it myself as I use Serviio daily.

Regards,

Smidge.

Never mind, I decompiled LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread.class, inserted ThreadUtils.currentThreadSleep(150L); into the inner loop of the searchForNewFiles() function, re-compiled, and set sail for home theatre nirvana.