Amarok performance tuning

[Ljubomir Simin]

> The reason why I had not replied yet is, most of these items simply have no
> effect on performance. There's really only two tips for getting a
> noticeable speedup:
>
> 1) Don't use giant playlists.
> 2) With a huge collection, use MySql or PSQL.
>
> Anything else is pretty much irrelevant.
>
> Another thought that crossed my mind is that current Amarok releases don't
> really have serious performance issues overall. Mine feels snappy. So it
> feels like a bit of anti-promotion to make an article about this.

Well, in my experience, disabling OSD, for example, noticeably reduces system 
usage during track change. Moobar, as another example, brought my desktop 
machine to it's knees. Disabling it was a relief. Next, some Contex Browser 
themes causes really sluggish scrolling (that's why I use the default one, or 
even disable context browser [no cover image changes, etc]). Copy cover 
script also increases resource usage on track change. I can imagine other 
scripts which do the same. Crossfade, as another example, causes analyzer to 
choke.

So, this all came from my experience with Amarok. I thought collecting all 
performance tricks on one place would be useful. 

Maybe it's about hardware, having 1GB of RAM would be cool.
On Sempron 2600 with 512MB of RAM performance is acceptable but I still close 
Amarok to gain some RAM when I need it. 
On (laptop) P3 1GHz with 256MB of RAM however, it runs so-so. With OSD, 
ratings and scores disabled, as well as most of Browsers, it is usable. But 
not rock solid. I still run XMMS on parties because there is simply too much 
risk to take when running Amarok. :) There are many hardware and software 
issues above Amarok, such as slow SD RAM, slow HDD, unoptimized distro 
(Kubuntu), but I would still appreciate if it runs faster.

PS. I would never run anti promotion for Amarok, at least not willingly :)


-- 
Ljubomir Simin 
Registered Linux User #351181
http://counter.li.org