Greetings!

Testing. But I don't think you will like the results...

Yesterday, I did not notice any problems with the ReserveCache=180. Today, I tried lowering that value to more reasonable numbers. Suffice it to say, I am leaving it at 180. I started to notice increasing instances of the drive icon showing the "W" (audio thread waiting for data) at around 160, and started hearing glitches around 145.

When I saw the glitching (Ws every second or so, with a big audio glitch around 17 seconds) at 6, 8, 10, 12, I decided to do the binary search approach. This brought me to a breakdown point of around 145-150...

Please note, I am not your typical user. My database is unusually large, and my FID count is off the map. So sane computations may not help. Of course, all of this is complicated by VBR files - I could tell that some files were more "trouble" than others, based on the bitrate and the amount of data needed / rate of cache drain. Also, I noticed that the glitches seemed to be made worse (to the ear) by having auto volume adjust in place - perhaps the wait / glitch in the audio thread is being interpreted as valid audio by the algorithm.

For me, a value of 180 for ReserveCache (a level where I only see an occasional W for very complex tracks) is an acceptable tradeoff, but I will still try downgrading to 2.00 this weekend.

Testing methodology:

(previous test complete)
q
rw
rwm
vi /drive0/var/config.ini
(change setting)
rom
ro
sync
hard reboot player (remove from sled)
start player playing
skip ahead at least six tracks (to make sure nothing cached)
play for at least 30 seconds, noting any Ws or glitches
repeat.

Anything audible failed, more than 3 or 4 Ws (depending on the complexity / bitrate of the track) was considered marginal. At 160 and below, I started seeing more Ws but no audio glitches. 150 brought glitches to more complex songs, 145 glitches in more songs than not.

SW: Player 2.01 and hijack 413 only. Auto Volume Adjust (low)
Highest FID: 0x7E4D (32,333)
empeg:/empeg/bin# ls -al /drive0/var
total 4484
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 27 15:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Aug 27 15:34 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 933 Sep 3 05:10 config.ini
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 4415935 Aug 27 15:54 database
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 137480 Aug 27 15:55 playlists
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 376 Aug 27 15:54 tags