Playlist Generation Is Too Slow Many Times (Playlist Generator Pro in 5.8.0.7)

[mondoman2k]

I use an event every two hours to generate a new playlist and overwrite the completing playlist.  I've had my system setup for years and it's worked fine all this time but since I've installed 5.8.0.7, I've had the playlist generation timeout many times which causes my playlist not refresh (i.e. dead air when current playlist finishes).  My Maximum Time To Generate Playlist By Schedule has always been set at 660 seconds and now I'm exceeding that amount of time fairly often.  I watched the generation of a playlist in Playlist Generator Pro (opened preset, selected "Generate", and monitored log) and playlist generation of my existing presets that typically take 6 - 8 minutes to finish now vary widely from 6 - 25 minutes to complete.  I've tried it on my primary playout PC and my backup PC with the same results.

Any ideas? 

With this current issue, I can't run my station unattended because it will not consistently generate my playlists in accordance with my programming schedule.

 

[djsoft]

The newer version should work with the same speed as any other recent version. Perhaps something else changed, e.g. other software loads CPU or disk and that affects playlist generator. How many tracks do you have in all the categories that playlist generator is using?

If you don't edit tracks with 3rd party software, you can consider using tag caching to speed up the processing, please see this page: https://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/tag-cache.htm

Another option (although not solving the 25 minute problem) is to generate a playlist without playback, using the command line interface: https://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/plgen_command_line_interface.htm - in this case, the timeout does not apply. And this way you can also generate multiple playlists at once and then use them throughout a day: https://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/generating-multiple-playlists.htm

 

[mondoman2k]

After investigating the problem in more detail, I discovered that my music library hard disk was beginning to fail ( a few bad sectors and ~20 corrupted music files) on my primary playout PC.  I replaced the disk and RadioBoss seems to work fine now.  I did change my setting to cache my tags so we'll see how much improvement in playlist generation that I see with that change.

As far as my backup PC exhibiting the same playlist generation problem, it appears the PC was experiencing "sympathy symptoms" for a day because it has been working fine generating the same playlists it has always been generating.  A false flag!
 

 

[djsoft]

I did change my setting to cache my tags so we'll see how much improvement in playlist generation that I see with that change.

Good. If possible, please post here when you see the results.

it appears the PC was experiencing "sympathy symptoms" for a day because it has been working fine generating the same playlists it has always been generating

It could also be that there was some background task that occupied disk or CPU and that made things slower. In some cases, we've seen performance degradation with certain antivirus programs.