Tommy’s Tunes Software Development
Indexing Service Problems
I resolved the indexing issue on the R3000 laptop computer. Apparently, the indexer does not do well at indexing data through a mount point, particularly when those mount points are on the same disk drive as other directories that are also being indexed. It seemed that if something on my C drive would change, the indexer would interpret the resulting NTFS change notification as also applying to the music files on the other side of the mount points (which were also located on drive C) even though nothing on the music disk drives did in fact change. This triggered constant reindexing, which slows down searches drastically. While reindexing, Windows explorer can’t use the indexer, so any search run during that time takes minutes as opposed to a fraction of a second. Unacceptable in the field.
I found further that as I turned off more and more services, the instances of that reindexing dropped, presumably because:
1. Windows services maintain many temporary files and registry entries and utilize the swap file,
2. which are all located on the system drive.
3. On my computer, the system drive is the C drive,
4. which is also where the mount points to the music drives are located.
5. Thus it follows that with fewer service programs running, the fewer writes to the C drive.
6. The fewer the writes to the C drive per second, the fewer change notifications generated.
7. And finally, the fewer change notification generated per second, the less reindexing occurs.
Well anyway, to get around this, I got rid of the mount points and went back to using two drive letters (E and F) for my two music drives. Then I reconfigured the indexer to index the music drives through the separate drive letters as opposed to the mount points on the C drive. This has drastically reduced the amount of document reindexing that was going on with the mount points. So, I’ll continue using the separate drive letters. Hopefully down the road, Microsoft will fix the mount point issue.
The other problem with the mount points was that visiting them in Windows Explorer and then moving one level higher, across the mount point back to the parent directory, would often cause Explorer to hang, necessitating a restart of Explorer. However, this doesn’t happen when accessing the music drives through separate drive letters. Again, this situation is highly undesirable when DJing a show. So using mount points for the foreseeable future is out.
TTConfig Startup Program
Today, I’m just playing around with a little startup program for Tommy’s Tunes, that performs various checks on the host computer. It does the following:
1. Checks the music drives for accessibility, integrity, and correct counts of songs on them.
2. Checks for presence of required Tommy’s Tunes software
3. Starts the indexing service.
Then, if it finds problems, it alerts the operator (namely, me) of any problems it finds.
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Tom Hesley