“I’ve got 1GB of memory in my 867MHz PowerMac. But at 15,500 tracks, iTunes is starting to become difficult (not quite impossible) to use. It hums along fine if I don’t touch it. But simply selecting a track can result in 20 seconds of spinning beachball. Editing an ID3 tag can take more than 30 seconds. Dragging tracks to a playlist, same. […] iPhoto is even worse. At around 800 images, it started to bog down on me.” Read Scot Hacker’s editorial at OReilly NetWork. The book writer (mostly known for his ‘BeOS Bible‘ book, now a MacOSX convert) finds scalability problems on the famous iApps and suggests these to be fixed before adding new features.
iPhoto, iTunes Falling Down on Library Size
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
…this actually caused a friend who is building a large media collection to switch FROM OS X to Windows, after he encountered this behaviour.
Apple opening up their library format would be a good first step to fixing this.
shacker should return to BeOS ;->
I was nice to have him in BeOS comunity…..
BTW, Eugenia, Merry X-Mass! (one on Jan. 7th, real one:-))
Apple’s “library format” is actually XML.
That is not where the problem is
I think they made a conscious decision when they chose the “cache everything into RAM” option instead of “load things when they are needed”
The first approach is wonderfull for light collections, as it makes the user feel the iApp is really snappy (in theory, OSX is not what I’d call “snappy”) even though it takes more time to load *and* the system chokes with huge collections.
Maybe they should add a checkbox in the preferences:
“Cache library items”
Just an idea…
<…this actually caused a friend who is building a large media collection to switch FROM OS X to Windows, after he encountered this behaviour.
Apple opening up their library format would be a good first step to fixing this.>
Right, and Bill Gates decided that Linux was better than windows and switched formats.
Nice try throwing cold water on the party. How many people does this affect? Put another way, how much does this affect sales? or people switching?
It’s a plumbing issue. If you read the article, it’s apparent that the Apple people working on the programs are well aware of it.
Now compare this “problem” to the new integration between the new iMovie, new iPhoto, new iDVD and iTunes. You see, there is a problem with the PC and MS always having to “catch up” It’s called – while they’re catching up, Apple is moving forward. Ergo, you never catch up.
… it’s time to call Opendoc 2!
to read even short articles by Scot. Scot played a big part in the BeOS community and will always have my respect. It was a sad day he left switchd to the Mac but you can’t really blame him.
Scot’s book on MP3 (from O’Reilly) is a great introduction to the subject, even if it is a little out to date.
Hopefully, Scot realizes that there are other MP3 players for MacOS X and will give them a try as well.
This reminds me of the old MacWrite & other freebie Apple SW, great for demos and small data sets, but useless for real heavy use. Apple was always shortsighted like this, features 1st, performance x years later or never. So much of old world MacOS was 16bit limited data structures, read the old .h files for loads of examples. So are they expecting the outside developers to come up with something much better?
On Windows I can use ThumbsPlus for 100,000 files no problem. If I flatten the hierarchy then it can slow down esp if I sort by similarity. I kind of expect at this stage of the game that all SW authors be familiar with what is possible on other platforms, and then set out to beat or match it.
Sounds like Apple mostly uses simple linked lists instead of more elaborate structures or lets junior coders release these apps.
Anyway good to hear from Scott.
I remember chatting with one of my Windows friends who is a “Internet DJ”. I made a bit of an exclamation when I realized that there were more than 1000 tracks ripped on my computer I hadn’t listened to yet. She was rather disbelieving that iTunes could handle more than 1000 (and actually more than 2000) tracks without and repercussions as WinAmp would have died long since (and taken Windows with it).
The point is there is a level of quality that you can reasonably expect for free, and iTunes far surpasses that. Then there is a level of quality (or scalability) for which you are going to have to pay.
I heard long ago stories of iTunes becoming slow at around 10,000 tracks, but that isn’t going to bother me. That wouldn’t even fit on my iPod (20gig), so that takes care of the last problem I would have giving up iTunes… which I don’t intend to do any time soon.
Btw, someone pointed out (not necessarily here) in regards to Apple charging for iDVD that Apple pays royalties for every copy shipped. iDVD isn’t the only app that is true about as iTunes must require royalties as well.
Trolling is a human right, but sometimes…
appleforever: Nice try throwing cold water on the party. How many people does this affect? Put another way, how much does this affect sales? or people switching?
Hm, a small story.
My girlfriend bought a el-cheapo digital camera (so el-cheapo that it only works in Windows), small, non-expansible (yes, no CF, no SmarMedia, no nothing) and with a meager 8MB of memory.
She spent New Year’s Eve with me (we live 450Km apart), so I set up the camera to take pictures at 320×240 and start shooting. At the end we took 150 photos, filling all memory
You needn’t to be a music or photo junkie to hit the ceiling Scott is talking, you need only to be caught by these fevers – and as a HP commercial says, “it it’s so easy, why not?”
– Cesar, that doesn’t have a digital camera yet AND it’s too lazy to rip all his CD collection to OGG
> more than 1000 (and actually more than 2000) tracks […] WinAmp
> would have died long since
This is _not_ true. My current music library consists of 1135 titles, and both WinAmp and iTunes handle them without a glitch. In fact, WinAmp has handled much greater loads for me; I can’t comment on iTunes, since my “good”/permanent music library doesn’t grow very fast 🙂
What about adding another hard drive (internal or external) just for music files, keeping the swap disk, OS X & apps, and music on different physical drives?
Would putting less of a burden on a single disk and spreading the task up to other i/o channels therefore improve performance? I have no idea, personaly.
Good Luck
i don’t use i-anything…and winamp falling down on several thousand songs….
what does this mean?
are you building a database of songs, and the database is corrupting?
or are you simply putting 10,000 files in a single folder and point the app at it?
i have about 8000 songs, and the folder structure is the organization. genre>>>artists>>>>albums>>>>songs.mp 3
at no point do any applications dealing with mp3s have to look at 10,000 files at one moment.
i’m probably just too stupid to understand.
Keep in mind that most (or all?) iApps
are not developed in house.
Maybe you should direct your requests
and feedback at the producer, not the
distributor.
the iApps are in house stuff. iTunes original came from something else, but Apple changed it alot, esp. in the interface. you see, apple does something that for some reason seems to escape the others – basically it’s attention to detail and a laserlike focus on the user — and it shows in everything they do.
i have >12,000 mp3s in iTunes and thousands of pictures in iPhoto and don’t experience that problem on a 15″iFlat/800Mhz/512MB.
although iPhoto is noticably slower than when i had only hundreds, it is by no means unusable. in iTunes i’ve noticed no problem at all.
maybe it’s how the library is organized. i’ve chosen to have itunes automatically move files into artist/album folders rather than however it does it otherwise.
It is quite obvious that Apple’s tactic is to develop shiny new applications without giving much consideration into how these apps will really perform.
As long as there are people who thinks that they should buy software just because it is apple and it looks cool, Apple will develop these type of apps which is not optimized at all.
The operating system itself is not optimized much, it is still way to too slow. It may make sense for Apple, since they are also making money out of hardware sales, and yet Apple is considered to be a competitior to Microsoft. Hahaha.
Apple is playing for niche market, where people care most about the brand name and the look of the stuff they own.
Apple is doing the right thing though, cause developing such applications take too much resources. Apple simply can not afford that.
If you have realized Apple become smaller and smaller in this market. They rely on mostly open source for their apps now, because they don’t have the resources and the background to develop complicated applications, such as a web browser.
If Apple can develop Safari in such a way that, third party developers for Apple can use it in their own applications without making it open source (GPL issue), then the browser move is a great and necessary move. Otherwise I don’t know why Apple did Safari.
Market! Can you believe that?
He claims apple has 30% of all home users, that most all web designers still use macs and the the new browser will revolutionize the world wide web!
Almost as nutty as Steve!!
http://www.opedit.org/articles/000010.html
>>She was rather disbelieving that iTunes could handle more than 1000 (and actually more than 2000) tracks without and repercussions as WinAmp would have died long since (and taken Windows with it). <<
I have 2300 songs on winamp without a problem and have at points had well over 3k. List arn’t the problem. I just wish winamp 3 actully worked, and they didn’t keap making fixes (changes rather) without changing the version number. till then 2.8 works.
Far as itunes it sounds like they just need to add an option as to load them all into memory or partialy, or have it auto choose based on the number of songs your pointing it to. Surely the problem can’t be the end of the world for apples programmers. They can make X11 not suck, surely they can do this in an afternoon.
…now we get bad Mac & OS X news again 😉
boy you MS lovers have a real winner on your side there
yea apple can’t “afford” to write software, they only have lots of salaried employees that are software engineers, seem to be “affording” that
also, most of their software is from open source – how clueless is this guy, or is he 12 or something?
that most of apple’s software is open source – like all the iapps, quartz, etc. boy, lot of good stuff just fell into open source, or wait, sergio is just an idiot
> It’s good to have Eugenia back from holidays
I am not back yet. Hang on for more.
appleforever: that most of apple’s software is open source – like all the iapps, quartz, etc. boy, lot of good stuff just fell into open source, or wait, sergio is just an idiot
i* and Quartz? Open Source? Where I can get the source? And under what license? I looked all over Apple’s websites and doesn’t find.
They rely on mostly open source for their apps now
When will all you people get it right, in the last thread, someone was bitching because Apple uses too much propriety in their Apps and then Super-Smart-as-a-brick Sergio comes along saying it is mostly open-source. Hey Sergio, have you ever even see the source code? Do you have any clue what you are talking about when it comes to this? No, you don’t.
For the record, I have a 20GB iPod and use iTunes to store about 12,000 songs, though I have a separate HD dedicated to it, I’ve never experienced any sluggishness.
Apple simply can not afford that
Have you ever looked at Apple’s revenues? You should, they are listed at SEC like everyone else, they made PLENTY of money last year. Yeah sales were down, but they still made a sweet profit.
don’t have the resources and the background to develop complicated applications
Wow, that is very intelligent to say, Sergio, perhaps you haven’t noticed but Apple has been writing software for about two decades now. Get Real. That’s why FinalCutPro is making GREAT inroads in the video industry.
Someone slap Sergio, his stupidity is astonishing.