>Currently the player takes about a minute to start up with 3000 files.

I wonder if maybe the dentry cache needs some tuning on the Empeg.

The long long database rebuild times have always bugged me, as has the amount of time (very similar) it takes for a complete root playlist download from the khttpd server. These are mostly just repetitive directory lookups, followed by disk reads.

If we prevented fs and block-layer read-aheads on all accesses to the metadata files, it would probably also show a huge impact.

EDIT: I wonder if our kernel has DIRECT_IO in it? This would also help big time here.

Mmm...