MPD 0.24 and Input Cache

[TheOldPresbyope]

From the MPD manual

Configuring the Input Cache

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 would be surprised that adding tracks to the cache would change the memory usage. I'd expect the cache to be a fixed-sized carve out.

As for its advantages, I've never felt the need for them on any moOde player of mine. YMMV, of course.

As Tim says, It still looks rather experimental which is dev-speak for  use at your own risk.

Regards,
Kent

I thought that was further down in the manual:

Buffer Settings


Do not change these unless you know what you are doing.
Setting                                   Description
audio_buffer_size SIZE       Adjust the size of the internal audio buffer. Default is  (4 MiB).

I don't understand what you are trying to do but the input cache is not the same as the audio buffer. Per the manual,

Code:

To enable the input cache, add an input_cache block to the configuration file:

input_cache {
   size "1 GB"
}

This allocates a cache of 1 GB. If the cache grows larger than that, older files will be evicted.

You can flush the cache at any time by sending SIGHUP to the MPD process, see Signals.

If you enable the input cache in moOde's MPD configuration screen then you'll see this input_cache block show up in /etc/mpd.conf

As I said, I don't use it. There may be others who'll care to comment.


Regards,
Kent