Hoster Power Hungry

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by dspins

The raid is being mirrored. As for the singer list, I do not know the exact number of songs, but it is more than 20 on a few of them. The longer the list, the greater chance of seeing a pause in the music. Another note, even if you run only hoster, loading CD+G's that singers bring in during a show causes problems. This is also a new symtom.

Think about the function of a mirror raid and how it operates. When you make any change to the primary drive it imediately is changed on the mirror drive. Now add that Hoster saves the playlist after everything you do to modify it. If you make any change to the Singer's Database this is also imediately saved. When you import a singer's disk a temporary file is written to the drive. If your ZIP files that you had imported (assuming they were not imported with 4.06 or 4.08) are still in ZIP (HDZIP) then before the file can play it has to written to 2 temporary files (unzipped). Now take all of this and double the activity to also write all this to the mirror. Add on top of all that the shuffling of data to and from the PageFile that Windows uses for itself and it becomes a lot of drive activity. Is the mirrored drive a problem? It could very well be and if it isn't THE problem it certainly will contribute to it.

I too have one computer that I test Hoster on that will cause glitches when I import from a singer's disk, but I fully expect this. It is my main computer at home and not a show machine. On this computer I have a lot of programs/processes running (both foreground abd background), because I do all of my business on it. However my show computers don't have a problem with importing while a song is playing. It seems that some people do and some don't and it has been that way through a lot of versions. My learned opinion is it has to do with the way some computer hardware is set up to handle I/O with the drives and how well they use the DMA, but that is getting a bit deep and there is no way for MTU to control that.

You might try running a mock show situation and keep Task Manager open to watch the Performance and Processes when you are doing all these things. This could help you pinpoint the major causes of the problem.