I have been using MP3Tag for many years and think it works very well in most situations. However I recently trying to review my entire collection (almost 30,000 files) and noticed that the program took an exceptionally long time to load all of the data (around 30 minutes). CPU utilization was around 10% and network utililization was around 200 Mbps.
s there anyway to improve the network performance so that it can saturate the available bandwidth? My network has connections of up to 10 Gbps so there is a lot of potential for improvement. I tried a similar test using files on a local hard drive and I think that is 5-6 times faster.
Do you really have a 10Gbit/s Network adapter inside your PC, a 10Gbit/s capable LAN cable to your switch, a Switch that support 10 Gbit/s on the used ports, a 10Gbit/s capable LAN cable to your NAS and a 10 Gbit/s LAN-Adapter inside your NAS?
Then your NAS needs a very powerful CPU to manage this speed and extremely fast HDDs or SSDs to save the amount of data.
Yes, I do have all of those components. I don't expect 10Gbps from HDD in my NAS but it can approach that with a fast SSD. I do expect comparable performance to a local HDD from the NAS.
You could still optimize your system for best performance:
MP3tag on local SSD
MP3tag configuration folder on local SSD
Activated library.
Files for treatment on local SSD.
Each part of that setup on the NAS will slow down access.
There is no switch in MP3tag to speed up or slow down network access.
You don't need all that to achieve a 10gbit/s connection. I have an ethernet cable running from my workstation straight into the nas using a different subnet than the normal 1gbit/s network (because 10g switches are expensive). These days not even crossover cables are needed for that and 10gbit/s ethernet cards can be bought used for ~50€ each. SFP+ cards can be bought even cheaper than that.
With an 8 hdd wide pool I get 700MByte/s sequential writes when copying hundreds of gigabytes (until the ram cache of the server is full it starts off at the full 10GBit/s).
The CPU in the server is a low clocking xeon from 2017 (I think around 2,5GHz boost clock).
However loading music files into mp3tag is still pretty slow over the network (even after creating a windows defender exception for mp3tag).
When loading ~100GB of music from a network share into mp3tag the network load is only around 80-100MBit/s initially.
And even when opening the same music again (the majority of it is read from the ram cache of the server in this case) it only manages around 200MBit/s.
When copying the same movie file from the nas multiple times in comparison, the initial copy runs at around 700MByte/s and the 2nd time it maxes out the 10GBit/s as it's read from the ram cache.
So a hardware bottleneck on the server side can be pretty much ruled out as a limiting factor since the files are read from ram and the cpu load is minimal.
I'm not sure what bottlenecks it but opening or editing music on network shares in mp3tag is slow.
This type of network activity is not very dependent on network throughput, but latency. File headers are read, then metadata. Small but many reads over the network will never be even close to an Ethernet network’s throughput.