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buggy dircache activity renders ipod almost completely unresponsive

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squidkidd:
First a little backstory:  dircache has never worked quite right on my 80gb ipod since I got it back in June '07.  For a long while, the main symptom was that I would get a foreground "scanning disk" on every other boot.  This seemed to stop for me several months ago (probably with the fix to prevent dircache from breaking if interrupted in a background scan) and all seemed well.

A couple of weeks ago about the time I started using the portal player device disable battery builds (and now subsequently the svn builds) the dircache has started to show signs of odd behavior again.  I am not saying at all this is what is causing this behaviour, just that it was about that time I noticed it.

Now when I turn the player on, I do not get the foreground scans any longer, but I get a very long background scan (anywhere from 200-300 seconds).  During this time controls on the player are almost completely unresponsive.  I have it set to resume playback on boot.  Once playback has resumed however it may take up to 30 seconds for the screen to respond to what is being played.  If I hit menu, it can take up to 30 seconds to go there.  If the resumed song finishes in this time frame, the next does not start playing for at least 15 seconds.  After the 200-300 seconds though, all functionality, including dircache, as far as I can tell is back to normal.  

I'm using cabbie2.0 with no eq.  Thoughts?

Regards,
Brian

baobab68:
It sounds a bit like this:

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=15465.0

only a lot worse.

Out of interest, if you set it to not resume playback on startup, how long does the dircache scan take? On my iRiver H320, that seems to help a lot.

I'm not suggesting that it's a fix, but maybe it's a pointer to what's going wrong. It seems like some kind of thread priority issue or disk contention to me.

squidkidd:
With resume playback stopped it takes 29 seconds.  30 seconds beats 4 minutes, but yeah, definitely not a practical solution.  I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but I have 19000 songs on the ipod.

Regards,
Brian

baobab68:
I have over 10000 on my iRiver, with a similar situation (well not quite as pronounced as yours).

I wonder if we should log it as a bug report?

GodEater:
It doesn't need logging as a bug report, the developers are aware of it. (I get the same issue myself - and as a stopgap measure to make my ipod usable, have used the spinlock revert patch to at least get my ipod into a useable state : FS 8568)

To make the problem less obvious - make sure you're not using a AA enabled theme too. I've gone to BlackGlassNonAA myself - the fight between the buffering code and the dircache update are what make the problem really bad - and leaving the buffering code to only load music, rather than music AND album art goes a long way to alleviating the issue.

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