Reducing delays when moving from one track to another

[TheOldPresbyope]

I get the impression from the MPD documentation (https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/use...nput-cache) that a primary motivation for the input cache was to overcome delays imposed by slow hard drives.

The input cache prefetches queued song files before they are going to be played. This has several advantages:

• risk of buffer underruns during playback is reduced because this decouples playback from disk (or network) I/O
  

• bulk transfers may be faster and more energy efficient than loading small chunks on-the-fly
  

• by prefetching several songs at a time, the hard disk can spin down for longer periods of time
  

This comes at a cost:

• memory usage
  

• bulk transfers may reduce the performance of other applications which also want to access the disk (if the kernel’s I/O scheduler isn’t doing its job properly)
  

I never bothered to read the C++ source code in MPD/src/input/cache in the MusicPlayerDaemon github repo, brrrr.

Regards,
Kent