Disable scanning?

It's not doing a full media scan - if you use Wireshark you will see that the device constantly monitors the sources in the background.

So if it detects a change on the drive it then essentially does a directory scan - think of it as doing a dir/s in DOS - and when it finds the change it will only media scan that change,

In my case, for a source with only about 200 movies this takes approx 800ms including scanning the changed file, so extrapolate that to 13,000 and you're talking about 55s and it should be considerably less since as I say, a portion of that 800ms is the time taken to retrieve the poster etc online and update the database.

https://streamable.com/ghos5b

How long does it take in your case?

 

I can benchmark the scan when I've got some time.
Would selecting "update" on the source be sufficient?

Should I have logging enabled at the same time?

 

It would be interesting to know, especially if it was orders greater than a minute or so because I wouldn't expect that to be the case. Unfortunately I don't have a single source with anything like that number of videos so I can't test for that...

Yes, Update Source does the same thing as far as I know. I wouldn't enable logging at this stage.

 

OK ...
Took just over a minute to scan 650 movies.
It took 38 minutes to scan 12300 files in the TV folder!!!

This is via gigabit ethernet, connected to a synology NAS, via SMB (my synology reports that the z9x is using the SMB2 protocol, rather than SMB3 - not sure if that will make a difference).

 

Ok - something definitely wrong there I'd say.

I can't get near 12000 files but I'm just trying to create a dummy library of maybe 1000 in one place to test...

 

Ok, I put together a dummy library of 1500 titles in one source and scanned into HT

So I created a dummy library of 1571 movies - basically I copied all the movie folders (without files) from all the sources I have (DVD, HD and UHD) into one folder and then copied the same small dummy mkv file into each movie folder and renamed them the same as the folder. This gives me a very compact test library.

I then reset HT4, scanned, corrected all scraping errors (mostly due to my naming mistakes!) and once the library was complete I exported NFOs and artwork for future use - such a dummy library is extremely useful for testing!

So then I tested how long an "Update" would take and I tried this for a fast NAS drive (Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Ultra) and a slower, older one (Western Digital original My Cloud).

In both cases, the network transfer speed of each NAS did not seem to make a difference - the "update" of 1571 files took between 23 and 24s. I tested this several times and also checked it was the same if I add another file to the library (it was).

So my maths of scaling up 850ms for 209 movies doesn't work - if it did, 1571 movies should take taken about 6 or 7s rather than 23 or 24s.

I also tried the library copied to a Sandisk USB 2.0 stick and that gave 23s.

Out of interest I also tried exactly the same thing on a Z9X Pro and that consistently produced an update time of 14s on the network and 15s on USB.


Not sure where that leaves us other than to say that an update time of over a minute for 650 movies looks very excessive given the numbers I'm getting, but I'm not sure why. It may be something to do with the way you NAS is structured - is it spanned?

It's also interesting that I get the same results on USB as I do over the network on both boxes..

 

Interesting.
So my NAS is a 12bay Synology NAS, using SHR2 (which is kinda like RAID6?). All bays are populated.
It's connected to a unifi switch using 3x 1gbe ports using link aggregation (the 4th port is used for other purposes).
The Z9X has another unifi switch between itself and the main switch (I did try direct connection to the main switch - and there were no differences).

Finally, on a separate computer, I ran the dir -s command on the TV Shows folder (also via SMB). It took about 10 seconds to complete that command. I also have an emby server, and library scans take seconds on that too.

Not sure what else to test? The only difference is the Z9X is connecting via SMB2, while the PC is using SMB3.

 

My NAS doesn't report what SMB version is being used, but I can switch SMB versions on the NAS.

Switching between SMB2 and SMB3 (and rebooting in between) makes no difference which either means I'm getting these readings on SMB2 (if the Zidoo is only connecting at SMB2 like yours) or switching protocols makes no difference (if it connects SMB3 when available as it should).

Dir/s on my PC on my library of 1571 movies is 10s also (there are 7700 files because of fanart/posters/NFOs).

My suspicion is that this extended access time is something to do with how the discs are spanned in combination with how the Zidoo accesses them.

Unfortunately I doubt there's much you can do - I can't see Zidoo rewriting code at this level although it shouldn't be ruled out, but I tend to take a more pragmatic approach and figure out a workaround. One such workaround would be to split the source up, maybe alphabetically. A pain in the arse I know, but at least it's an idea to get around it.

 

I just tried forcing SMB3 - and my Z9X cannot connect. Seems it can only utilise SMB2 - maybe there's something there?
Can you find out if the Zidoo actually supports SMB3?

 

Did you rename the TV folder recently by any chance? It would take it as a brand new folder and rescan from scratch.

 

I have close to 150TB... I have been struggling for a while find a solution to stop this problem. Any fixes to stop the scanning?

When I monitor "active streams" in unraid... There is usually activity/scanning going for quite some time after the movie file has started playing... This appears to be the cause of or at least related to my stutter or audio drop outs.

Any work around?

 

This happens all the time... The only file playing at the time was Transformers.

 

Sorry for the delay -
My solution was to exclude the majority of the library. I found once I approached a size much greater than 3 or 4 thousand files, the degradation was significant.

So now I only use my z9x for movies, and shows I'm actively watching (rather than catalog everything)