Slow Searching

Why is searching and sorting slow?

Well, frankly it's cuz I am not using a super smart database in the back end. You see, when I started this project, i just whipped something together as fast as I could, so I could see results quickly. In hindsight, it would have been worth my time to invest in understanding how to program SQLite, rather than rolling my own. SQL has these blazing fast indexes that make sorting and searching fast enough to update *as you type*, even for a library with 100,000 songs in it. My implementation, however, is only fast enough if you have say 10,000 songs. But even this bogs down when the meta data is not cached, for example the "Label" field is stored only in xml files next to the song files, that data is not stored in the database proper, so when you go to sort by that, kJams must load every single xml file for every song.

So, eventually i'll be removing my old, creaky, written-from-the-seat-of-my-pants database, and replacing it with one based on SQLite. Once that's done, all the data will be in one place, and all those progress bars will just "go away". Keep in mind however that this is a MAJOR re-write of a huge portion of my code, so it's not going to happen soon, or when i start, quickly. Things are working "okay" for now, so i have other fish to fry, like DVD playback, and my Skunkworks project which you can probably guess.

Meanwhile, if you have more than 10,000 songs, i recommend you turn OFF the "update search results as you type" preference. This feature has been removed because too many people thought it sucked because they didn't get it.

Another thing you can do to speed up your searches is to hide any columns you don't want to search. The more columns you have showing, the slower the search will go. To show or hide the search columns, just Context Click in the column header and pick the one you want to show or hide.

Especially slow are the following items (hiding all of them will dramatically speed up searching):

Sub Genre
Composer
Original Publisher
Publisher
Rendition
Keywords
Bio
Original Year
Language
Key
BPM

Click here for more info on Searching.