Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion
buggy dircache activity renders ipod almost completely unresponsive
Llorean:
What he wants you to do is turn *off* automatic database updates. Then wait for the disk to spin down after booting, start a database update, and then resume playback, to see if you have similar problems then.
Basically, the idea is to see if it's the updates that are causing the problem, or if it's relating to when the updates happen, rather than just what they do. At least, testing this theory as best as reasonably possible.
jhMikeS:
Thanks Llorean. :) More specifically, this allows the HD power to be cycled once and see if things change. The HD power won't be turned off until several seconds after the HD has spun down from no activity. Then we want to have similar activity to the initial boot situation after repowering it and see if unresponsive UI or skipping is there.
I'll state again that it is by design that database update would take longer during playback than not during playback because it is a background update after all and takes a back seat to decoding audio. It will be true regardless of revision used.
The unresponsiveness and skipping that happens without the ata hack is utterly peculiar to the 60/80GB Video.
surfer:
Please be aware as well that at least me and the starter of this thread, squidkidd, have this issue independently of the database.
I do not use the db and have never initialized it. It seems to be something related to the scanning for the dircache.
Some changes seem to have been made related to the dircache on one of the builds 17463-9 (2008-05-12) which introduced the problem (again).
dip:
I have now turned off automatic database updates, rebooted and waited until the disk stopped spinning (which took again about 30 sec. as with automatic database updates on). Then I selected update database now and started immediately browsing (the database not the file tree). In this case there was no lag in browsing although database was updated in the background.
Since I had the impression that the problem could be related to the loading of dircache into RAM I in addition turned off this feature. Only for completeness in a first test I waited after reboot until the disk stopped spinning which took again about 30 seconds. As expected, browsing after disk stopped spinning was slower than before and you could see the "searching... " popup which counts the found albums probably since database had now to be read from disk and not from RAM.
In a second test after a further reboot I started browsing during the disk was spinning. In this case browsing took again much longer and the "searching..." popup counter did not continuously increase but was regularely interrupted. But I had the impression that the ipod was still a little bit faster than when automatic database update and loading dircache to RAM was on.
Then I turned loading dircache to RAM on again and after a reboot I started browsing the database during the disk was spinning. Then I had almost the same bad unresponsivness as at the very beginning.
So it seem to me that there is some disk activity after a reboot which take about 30seconds (after the Rockbox logo dissapears) and which catches almost all disk ressources. This seems not to be the automatic databse update and also not the dircache loading to RAM although the unresponsiveness seem to be even worse when both features are additionally turned on. In the latter case probably browsing has to fight not only with the unknown disk activity process but in addtion with the update process and the loading to RAM process.
Does that make sense?
Sherv:
Adding my voice to the chorus. Running r17659-080530 and I experience the same problem if I resume playback immediately after booting. Waiting for the disk activity to cease before doing anything else (directory cache is on, database loading to RAM is off, last.fm logging is on [I read at one point that this may be a culprit]) results in clean and responsive playback.
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