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Problem: Sluggish UI performance revisited
#1
See following posts for the less than satisfactory conclusion.  I thought I had it.  Nope.

For several years I've only been able to use the Moode web interface on a desktop machine.  My tablet and phone's browsers quickly "freeze" and can take a minute or longer to respond to screen input. Clearing the browser cache works for about 30 seconds.  My workaround had been an Android MPD client.  This week I parleyed a Father's Day gift card and some money to get an Allo Boss2 player.  One of the things Allo says is that wifi performance using the built in adapter may be a bit weak. That's a polite way of putting it.  I decided to try a generic AC1200 USB adapter I had lying around.  After finding out how to disable the built in wifi adapter I got the dongle working. The magic words are:  dtoverlay=disable-wifi in config.txt.  By gosh, Allo was right.  The web interface works just fine on my Lenovo sub-$200 tablet.  Also on my low end Nokia phone with only 2.4 GHz wifi.  Bonus:  My 80K file library used to take 4 or 5 hours for the initial scan.  With the USB adapter it took 2.  

Assuming this continues I'll be thrilled.   I actually have access to the web interface on my tablet  Moode has been my favorite because it has a decent UI  and more configuration features than I'll ever use.  The ones I have used have all been useful.  This is my bedroom system so I listen at relatively low volumes.  I set up a loudness contour in CamillaDSP and am very happy with it.  I doubt I'll ever exceed 5W output, and that on transient peaks, so the contour is a real plus.  Next stop, room calibration.
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#2
Somehow I posted only a partial quote. On 7/2 mobile device performance returned to "normal." The web UI freezes immediately when it loads. Clearing the browser cache does nothing. When I can talk her into it I'm going to try the UI on my wife's ipad which is a bit stronger than my tablet. Performance is fine on a desktop machine, as I've mentioned. Maybe what I need is something that costs twice as much as my $200 1 year old device'


(06-24-2022, 11:36 PM)Sadly, it was temporary.  Performance on mobile devices is back to "normal. Wrote: n take a minute or longer to respond to screen input. Clearing the browser cache works for about 30 seconds.  My workaround had been an Android MPD client.  This week I parleyed a Father's Day gift card and some money to get an Allo Boss2 player.  One of the things Allo says is that wifi performance using the built in adapter may be a bit weak. That's a polite way of putting it.  I decided to try a generic AC1200 USB adapter I had lying around.  After finding out how to disable the built in wifi adapter I got the dongle working. The magic words are:  dtoverlay=disable-wifi in config.txt.  By gosh, Allo was right.  The web interface works just fine on my Lenovo sub-$200 tablet.  Also on my low end Nokia phone with only 2.4 GHz wifi.  Bonus:  My 80K file library used to take 4 or 5 hours for the initial scan.  With the USB adapter it took 2.  

Assuming this continues I'll be thrilled.   I actually have access to the web interface on my tablet  Moode has been my favorite because it has a decent UI  and more configuration features than I'll ever use.  The ones I have used have all been useful.  This is my bedroom system so I listen at relatively low volumes.  I set up a loudness contour in CamillaDSP and am very happy with it.  I doubt I'll ever exceed 5W output, and that on transient peaks, so the contour is a real plus.  Next stop, room calibration.
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#3
I tried my wife's ipad.  The web UI seems to work although I didn't give it enough time.  I've seen the honeymoon thing before.  My current Android tablet has a MediaTek® Helio G90T (Octa-Core, 2x A76 @2.05GHz + 6x A55 @2.0GHz,) processor, 6GB RAM, wireless AC. As mentioned above I'm using an AC1200 wifi dongle.  Wifi signal strength in the rooms where I use it most often is in the -55 dBf range.  Transmission speed is around 300 mBs.  I've used Brave, Firefox, and Opera browsers.  I've avoided Chrome for security reasons.  My library contains a little over 80K files.  I use browse by folder exclusively because my files are haphazardly tagged and I don't want to spend several days regularizing the tags when I have a system that works.  

The web interface freezes almost immediately.  Response time is in the range of 30 to 60 seconds.  Clearing the browser cache has no effect.  Web browsing works fine on most every site I've used.  Amazon, Wikipedia, various search engines, other retail sites, Washington Post,...  MALP works great as a front end for Moode.  It works on my cheap phone.  Likewise, with Moode in the LMS client mode, Squeezer controls it satisfactorily.  BubbleUPNP works with Moode in the UPNP renderer mode.  I don't want to spend $400 or $500 on a mobile device that I use almost exclusively for content consumption.  I like the control Moode provides and would prefer to use the web interface.  FWIW, while I don't care for the Volumio UI, the web interface does perform satisfactorily.
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#4
As your device is rendering a complex web UI containing all the metadata for your 80,000 track library, UI responsiveness is very much dependent on the web browser, the CPU performance of the device running the web browser and the size of the library (aka the amount of json data being rendered into html).

I had issues with my cheapo tablet and my >100k library, i bought a decent tablet, problem solved. Chrome performs well, Firefox can be faster but doesn't do full-screem on mobile operating systems so that's out for me.

As you say, you can instead use an MPD client like MALP (better still, MAFA) to avoid the overhead of rendering a web UI on slow devices.
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#5
[quote pid='41869' dateline='1657989434']
As your device is rendering a complex web UI containing all the metadata for your 80,000 track library, UI responsiveness is very much dependent on the web browser, the CPU performance of the device running the web browser and the size of the library (aka the amount of json data being rendered into html).

I had issues with my cheapo tablet and my >100k library, i bought a decent tablet, problem solved. Chrome performs well, Firefox can be faster but doesn't do full-screem on mobile operating systems so that's out for me.

As you say, you can instead use an MPD client like MALP (better still, MAFA) to avoid the overhead of rendering a web UI on slow devices.
[/quote]

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Hmm...I spent a long time coding for dumb to moderately smart green screen terminals and wonder why the web browser is being used this way.  Coming from my place of ignorance it seems to me that things like the contents of the library should be handled by a back end application and the browser used only to display the data rather than caching it all in RAM, maybe with the aid of a swap file.  Maybe that approach is impossible.  I just tried the Moode web interface using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM and got comparable results to my tablet which has 6 GB RAM and an 8 core processor that's at least twice as fast.  Admittedly the Pi doesn't have to support a 2K display. 
Volumio runs acceptably on my tablet.  They're both based on MPD.  I don't care for Volumio for a lot of reasons but it does perform better as far as browsing my files and responding to what in the green screen world they call a function key, i. e. a request to do something that requires updating the screen.
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#6
Is this related to a similar issue as discussed here?

https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=4846
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#7
(07-17-2022, 10:00 PM)suzywong Wrote: Is this related to a similar issue as discussed here?

https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=4846

Might be.  I'll have to look at lazy loading in the browsers I'm using.  I'm using Android, but I'm confident the browser behavior is platform agnostic.  BTW, in discussions of this problem I see suggestions for clearing the browser cache.  It has no effect on performance for me.
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#8
I looked up lazy loading and discovered it's the time honored technique of loading one screen at a time and reloading when the user either scrolls or goes to a different screen.  Firefox has a global setting in about:config but on Android the user is locked out of about:config except in the nightly  and beta versions.  I'm sure something like that would enhance performance depending on the hardware.  It kind of reinforces my point about the browser being a terminal and not a data store.
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#9
I'm not ready to mark this solved but the tablet I got a week ago seems to be working.  It has 6 GB RAM and a Mediatek G90 processor, Android 11.  I run into occasional lags when I first load the UI but things settle down. I haven't given it a severe workout like 4 hours of continuous use, but in  1 to 2 hour sessions it seems to run OK.  I can load the config screens and browse folders with acceptable response times. It's not as fast as my i7 desktop but it's not an i7 desktop. Oddly, it only works with Firefox.  I've also tried Brave and Opera.  It may be that Firefox plays better with Moode than the Chromium based browsers.  The tablet cost $250 on a Prime Day deal, which puts it near the top of my budget.  I'm hoping this is going to work.  I can remember using my Google Nexus 7 (2012) successfully with the contemporary version of Moode.  The Samsung tablet after that also worked.   Somewhere around the 5 series is when I first encountered response time problems.
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