Sluggish use experience with external server and wifi?

[Take]

Hello,

I've been searching for proper photo manager for quite a while and now
I'm giving digikam a chance to suit our family needs with photographs.
So far it seems to have the features I need, most important one being
ability to access photos from multiple computers and accounts.

I've set up an debian server with samba and mysql and connected my
workstation on the same LAN to server via digikam, which works just
fine. I copied most of our photos (~150GB if that matters) to
samba-share, ran mainteance tools from digikam and it rans somewhat
smoothly. Digikam itself tends to be a bit unstable, specially if you
mess around with tags when some mainteance is running.

However the real issue I've encountered is with my laptop. I'ts running
similar setup than my workstation, but it's connected to LAN over wifi.
Usage experience varies between satisfactory and total crap. Quite often
(once per minute or so) digikam just freezes for no apparent reason and
after a while it's again smooth sailing for a while until next freeze
occurs.

I tried to trace the problem to network (which would be the obvious
part) but there's little going on over wifi. Obviously it takes a while
to download thumbnails when I change to different tag/album, but the
problem is (for example) when I try to assign tags to "unknown people"
photos. Occasionally it takes around 30 seconds to get an photo
activated and after that a while to actually place the tag. During the
freeze UI is unresponsive, but some commands go trough, so I need to pay
attention about where to click to avoid unexpected things after UI
responds again.

As mentioned, there's little traffic on network, according to top
there's no processes on wait-state and everything else beyond digikam
works flawlessly. I even suspected that the mysql would be slow for some
reason, but there's no sign of that and even if it was the sql-server
I'd suppose that symptoms would appear on my workstation as well.

My workstation is running Debian Weezy and laptop has Jessie, both have
digikam from debian repository. Laptop is an thinkpad x301, so there
isn't (shouldn't be) any issues with funky wifi-drivers/firmware and as
mentioned everything else on the laptop works smoothly.

So, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix/improve the current
situation, or even ideas about how to track down the problem more
accurately?

--
Take
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[eldk]

Hello,

Should you connect your laptop to LAN via ethernet (10/100 or gigabit ?)
and see if you have the same problem ?

Should you give OS, digikam version from both PC's and mysql version ?


Greatings,

Eric

Le jeudi 19 septembre 2013 à 14:39 +0300, Take a écrit :

> Hello,
>
> I've been searching for proper photo manager for quite a while and now
> I'm giving digikam a chance to suit our family needs with photographs.
> So far it seems to have the features I need, most important one being
> ability to access photos from multiple computers and accounts.
>
> I've set up an debian server with samba and mysql and connected my
> workstation on the same LAN to server via digikam, which works just
> fine. I copied most of our photos (~150GB if that matters) to
> samba-share, ran mainteance tools from digikam and it rans somewhat
> smoothly. Digikam itself tends to be a bit unstable, specially if you
> mess around with tags when some mainteance is running.
>
> However the real issue I've encountered is with my laptop. I'ts running
> similar setup than my workstation, but it's connected to LAN over wifi.
> Usage experience varies between satisfactory and total crap. Quite often
> (once per minute or so) digikam just freezes for no apparent reason and
> after a while it's again smooth sailing for a while until next freeze
> occurs.
>
> I tried to trace the problem to network (which would be the obvious
> part) but there's little going on over wifi. Obviously it takes a while
> to download thumbnails when I change to different tag/album, but the
> problem is (for example) when I try to assign tags to "unknown people"
> photos. Occasionally it takes around 30 seconds to get an photo
> activated and after that a while to actually place the tag. During the
> freeze UI is unresponsive, but some commands go trough, so I need to pay
> attention about where to click to avoid unexpected things after UI
> responds again.
>
> As mentioned, there's little traffic on network, according to top
> there's no processes on wait-state and everything else beyond digikam
> works flawlessly. I even suspected that the mysql would be slow for some
> reason, but there's no sign of that and even if it was the sql-server
> I'd suppose that symptoms would appear on my workstation as well.
>
> My workstation is running Debian Weezy and laptop has Jessie, both have
> digikam from debian repository. Laptop is an thinkpad x301, so there
> isn't (shouldn't be) any issues with funky wifi-drivers/firmware and as
> mentioned everything else on the laptop works smoothly.
>
> So, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix/improve the current
> situation, or even ideas about how to track down the problem more
> accurately?
>

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Digikam-users mailing list
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[Take]

On 09/19/2013 10:20 PM, eric wrote:
> Should you connect your laptop to LAN via ethernet (10/100 or gigabit ?)
> and see if you have the same problem ?

Sorry, I obviously should've stated this in inital post. I connected my
laptop to ethernet (gigabit) and it's smooth(ish) all the way over
copper link. The interface is a bit more sluggish than on my workstation
but I'm assuming that's due to GPU (intel mobile vs. nvidia gt630).


> Should you give OS, digikam version from both PC's and mysql version ?

Digikam on laptop 3.1.0, on workstation 2.6.0. Mysql server 5.5.31,
samba server 3.6.6. Libraries on laptop are from debian jessie, on
workstation from debian wheezy, I don't know which versions are relevant
on the issue.

So, it seems to be that the network is causing the affect, but as I
mentioned on previous post there's not much going on at the wifi-link
during freezes, iptraf shows total traffic somewhere between
500-3500kbps while wifi can pull up to 50Mbps from the same samba share.
Latency is obviously higher over wifi, but still average ping from
laptop to server is around 4ms compared to <1ms over copper so I doubt
that it doesn't play any major part.


Additionally, I just noticed something which may be unrelated to the
issue. When digikam is running there's quite a few of messages on the
console:
QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
Digikam::ThumbnailCreator::load: Thumbnail is null for ""

However I've got no idea if those are related to freezes or are they
something I should take care in the first place.

--
Take
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[eldk]

Hello,
Le vendredi 20 septembre 2013 à 01:56 +0300, Take a écrit :
> On 09/19/2013 10:20 PM, eric wrote:
> > Should you connect your laptop to LAN via ethernet (10/100 or gigabit ?)
> > and see if you have the same problem ?
>
> Sorry, I obviously should've stated this in inital post. I connected my
> laptop to ethernet (gigabit) and it's smooth(ish) all the way over
> copper link. The interface is a bit more sluggish than on my workstation
> but I'm assuming that's due to GPU (intel mobile vs. nvidia gt630).

I think wifi is not a good solution for big data over network : drop
packets .. fluctuation, and crypting is cpu, time ... consuming. If you
want only to look at pictures, it's ok, but for tagging ... not.

second point : I think you should have the same digikam on both laptop
and workstation : they is some change in database schema between 2.x.x
and 3.x.x, so it's must be one of the problem, right ?

Third point : As I'm not using samba shares but mounting the NAS with
CIFS, I don't know if using samba is a problem. But cifs mounting in
fstab is more convenient and seem to be faster. That's only my
experience and point of view.

Greatings,

Eric

>
>
> > Should you give OS, digikam version from both PC's and mysql version ?
>
> Digikam on laptop 3.1.0, on workstation 2.6.0. Mysql server 5.5.31,
> samba server 3.6.6. Libraries on laptop are from debian jessie, on
> workstation from debian wheezy, I don't know which versions are relevant
> on the issue.
>
> So, it seems to be that the network is causing the affect, but as I
> mentioned on previous post there's not much going on at the wifi-link
> during freezes, iptraf shows total traffic somewhere between
> 500-3500kbps while wifi can pull up to 50Mbps from the same samba share.
> Latency is obviously higher over wifi, but still average ping from
> laptop to server is around 4ms compared to <1ms over copper so I doubt
> that it doesn't play any major part.
>
>
> Additionally, I just noticed something which may be unrelated to the
> issue. When digikam is running there's quite a few of messages on the
> console:
> QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
> Digikam::ThumbnailCreator::load: Thumbnail is null for ""
>
> However I've got no idea if those are related to freezes or are they
> something I should take care in the first place.
>

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Digikam-users mailing list
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[Take]

On 09/20/2013 10:28 AM, eric wrote:
> I think wifi is not a good solution for big data over network : drop
> packets .. fluctuation, and crypting is cpu, time ... consuming. If you
> want only to look at pictures, it's ok, but for tagging ... not.

I can't really see how tagging would be more resource expensive than
just viewing the photos, but it doesn't really matter at this case since
the same behaviour occurs regardless of actions at hand, digikam just
freezes occasionally.

I agree that wifi isn't the best solution for heavy lifting, but still
it should be quite enough for simple(ish) management of albums. I've got
the separate workstation for traffic intense activities (adding more
pictures, backups etc), but as far as I can tell wifi should still be
more than enough for basic usage.


> second point : I think you should have the same digikam on both laptop
> and workstation : they is some change in database schema between 2.x.x
> and 3.x.x, so it's must be one of the problem, right ?

It might cause the error messages, however I tried to build 3.4.0 by
myself and it's not really simple task. Additionally even if I finally
succeeded on the build the binary is very unstable, I suppose it's due
to older version of some kde-libraries, and to build everything up to
date by hand would cause even more additional work. However I assume
that different versions wouldn't cause freezing?


> Third point : As I'm not using samba shares but mounting the NAS with
> CIFS, I don't know if using samba is a problem. But cifs mounting in
> fstab is more convenient and seem to be faster. That's only my

As far as I know there is only cifs-utils for samba mounts anymore and
smbfs has been deprecated. However, I'm using cifs as well to connect to
samba server.

Long story short, I still don't know what to do to improve digikam usage
over wifi, and it's pretty much essential on my environment. I don't
mind if it takes a while for the images to load, but those occasional
freezes of digikam without any apparent reason are an issue I'd like to
get fixed.

--
Take

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