Twonky Forum

Hi all,

i'm running the latest twonky build at a synology ds211 nas. twonky starts automatically with booting the nas. my problem: twonky reindexes the library everytime i start the nas.

besides the facts that this is unnecessary, reindexing strains the HDDs and twonky needs around 10 minutes till it iis fully operational, there is one major problem: playlists created with a client software (windows media player or bubbleupnp/android) get scrumbled and unusable most often.

a forum search yielded that this issue has been reported back in 2007 at first. i hardly understand, why this hasn't been fixed yet, since twonky seems to be a commercial software and the reindexing thing makes twonky (which is a superb mediaserver else) useless for people like me. please add at least an option to disable this "startup reindexing feature".

thank you and yeahh: happy christmas to all!

winxi

Hello again,

the action that Twonky performs at restart is a mixture between 'Rescan content directories' and 'Rebuild database'. My Tests yielded:

-> Rescan content directories (started from the Maintenance page): duration ~1 minute, Twonky is fully operational meanwhile
-> Rebuild database (started from the Maintenance page): duration ~16 minutes, Twonky serves just the already built parts of the library and is fully operational after this 16 minutes
-> Restart server: duration ~7 minutes, Twonky serves just the already built parts of the library and is fully operational after this 7 minutes

Could somebody confirm if this is the intended behaviour? As stated above, my main problem is that playlists created and saved on the client side won't work after a server restart.
I use Twonky 6.0.38 (Kirkwood) on a Synology DS211 NAS with a library of ~25000 music files and a few thousand images and videos.

Thanks in advance, winxi

Every time TwonkyServer is restarted it verifies that the content stored in its database has not changed since the last time it was closed down. To do that the server compares the time stamps between the internal database and the media files on your disk. No media files are opened during this process. It's just comparing all of time stamps. This process should occur relatively fast on a normal sized media collection when content on the disk has not changed. One of the reasons it appears the database is being rebuilt, is because you see the number of media items on the server configuration status page increase over time. It looks a database rebuild, but should occur much faster.

The reason this is taking so long for you is you have a very large media collection and the processors in most NAS are slower than you would find in a fast desktop computer.

- Rick

Hello,

tanks for your answer, although it was just quoted from an older post. I see that in some cases this behaviour makes sense to preserve consistency.

But, as mentionned above, i cant use the playlists created and saved at my clients anymore after a restart, so i hardly can believe that there is nothing changed. This seems for me to be a considerable disadvantage. I would really appreciate an option to turn off this rescan at reboot, since twonky starts automatically with the NAS (so there isn't even a chance to change the library without twonky running).

If this would be possible, iwould instantly buy a license, since twonky seems great to me - execept for this little forced rescanning thing.

greets, winxi

I'll pass on your comments. Thanks. Obviously if we completely turned off rescans newly-added media would never appear. Are you asking for a manual rescan?

- Rick

Hello Rick,

thanks again for your answer. As Twonky automatically detects changed or new files while it is running, newly added media does appear immediatley, as it is intended (and this works great btw). So i don't think that the process twonky executes at a restart influences this behaviour.

As explained above, I dont really know what twonky is doing at restart (it seems to be a mixture between a rescan and a complete rebuild of the database). But i know, that this takes around 6 to 7 minutes till i can fully use my whole library and that this scrumbles my clientbased playlists (so it seems that twonky kind of rebuilds the database). Moreover i am quite sure, that this process (lets say rebuild) at restart is not neccessary, at least for my configuration.

So all i'm asking for is an option to turn off this rebuild of mediadata at restart.

I could use the native Synology mediaserver (which doesn't do any rescan or rebuild at restart), but i love twonky for its additional features (like upnp search or customizeable navigation trees).

Thanks for your attention, winxi

I've been talking to the engineers about this. They say the time is needed to add an item to the internal data structures of the navigation tree.

You suggestions are helpful. Hopefully we can come up with a permanent solution.

- Rick