The 200Mhz SA CPU is not the limitation here -- it sits practically idle while the rebuild goes on -- waiting for disk I/O nearly 100% of the time.

You see, the player software is very conservative about how it rebuilds the database, because it doesn't know what has or may have changed since the previous database was built. So, it discards everything (or is told to do so by (J)Emplode), and rebuilds from scratch, re-reading every single *1 tag file from the fids directories. On a 10000 song player, that means it has to do at least 10000 disk seeks and 10000 disk reads, plus all of the directory lookups and metadata reads required to locate the data blocks for those 10000 tag files.

Whereas JEmplode, knows what changes it is making, and can simply apply them as a delta to the previous database file from the player, without reprocessing 10000 tag files in the process. This will work fine nearly 100% of the time. And for a really screwed up player, we still have the option of letting the player regenerate it all from scratch if need be.

Cheers