> From the settings panel of this plugin I can see that performance is a
> major concern and I am getting varied result myself when browsing
> artists. Sometimes they come in as quickly as you would hope (and I
> guess they are retrieved from cache at the time) and sometimes the
> server would hang at certain artist images and block for roughly 5-10
> seconds or sometimes a placeholder image comes through where previously
> an image was returned. The latter only happens in instances where I am
> not connected to the internet while browsing, but was connected during
> scans.
As DJanGo pointed out make sure you configure the plugin to download the
images and store them locally. I'd even move the image files to a
dedicated folder where you can manually replace mis-matches or poor
images etc.
> Is there anything I can do to speed up the artist image retrieval? To
Most importantly: use LMS 7.9. Set the Performance/Memory parameter to
maximum (if you can afford it)
> add more context, I am displaying the artist images in my Windows
> Universal App and currently I am applying the following resizing to
> those images:
> http://localhost:9000/imageproxy/mai..._100x100_f.png. I
> am showing them in a list view which fetches roughly 20-30 images at a
> time.
Have you tried 100x100_o instead? The problem is most likely that the
first time you want an image, the plugin has to get it. If you don't
pre-cache them, for every image the plugin has to:
- check the music file's folder (and some parent folders, too) for a
local image
- check a potential local cache for the image
- head over to Last.fm to try to find image information for the artist
- fetch the artwork (if found)
- resize the image
- return it to you
As Last.fm would often return URLs for rather large PNG files, the
download of that file alone can take a few seconds!
Now to further speed up your use case you (as a dev) can register your
custom image size you want to have pre-cached. See the "artworkspec" CLI
command. I asked about 100x100_o, as this would by default be pre-cached
for the web UI. If you were using the same, your image cache wouldn't
explode, and the scan wouldn't take longer as with the additional size.
> Ideally, I would like all artist images to be retrieved from online
> sources only during scans and then stored locally (maybe that is
> actually already happening) and only retrieved from local storage. If an
Yes, that's what should happen if configured correctly.
> am not using the correct settings. Album images, by the way, come back
> from the server very quickly.
Artist artwork should be pretty much the same if pre-cached.
--
Michael
> major concern and I am getting varied result myself when browsing
> artists. Sometimes they come in as quickly as you would hope (and I
> guess they are retrieved from cache at the time) and sometimes the
> server would hang at certain artist images and block for roughly 5-10
> seconds or sometimes a placeholder image comes through where previously
> an image was returned. The latter only happens in instances where I am
> not connected to the internet while browsing, but was connected during
> scans.
As DJanGo pointed out make sure you configure the plugin to download the
images and store them locally. I'd even move the image files to a
dedicated folder where you can manually replace mis-matches or poor
images etc.
> Is there anything I can do to speed up the artist image retrieval? To
Most importantly: use LMS 7.9. Set the Performance/Memory parameter to
maximum (if you can afford it)
> add more context, I am displaying the artist images in my Windows
> Universal App and currently I am applying the following resizing to
> those images:
> http://localhost:9000/imageproxy/mai..._100x100_f.png. I
> am showing them in a list view which fetches roughly 20-30 images at a
> time.
Have you tried 100x100_o instead? The problem is most likely that the
first time you want an image, the plugin has to get it. If you don't
pre-cache them, for every image the plugin has to:
- check the music file's folder (and some parent folders, too) for a
local image
- check a potential local cache for the image
- head over to Last.fm to try to find image information for the artist
- fetch the artwork (if found)
- resize the image
- return it to you
As Last.fm would often return URLs for rather large PNG files, the
download of that file alone can take a few seconds!
Now to further speed up your use case you (as a dev) can register your
custom image size you want to have pre-cached. See the "artworkspec" CLI
command. I asked about 100x100_o, as this would by default be pre-cached
for the web UI. If you were using the same, your image cache wouldn't
explode, and the scan wouldn't take longer as with the additional size.
> Ideally, I would like all artist images to be retrieved from online
> sources only during scans and then stored locally (maybe that is
> actually already happening) and only retrieved from local storage. If an
Yes, that's what should happen if configured correctly.
> am not using the correct settings. Album images, by the way, come back
> from the server very quickly.
Artist artwork should be pretty much the same if pre-cached.
--
Michael