Summer is here, and we all know what that means: GSoC and hack time! This year I will try to document the progress here. Who am I? I am a 22 year old computer science student from Norway attending GSoC for the second time. Once again I was given a chance to work on XMMS2 and S4. It is off to a slow start at first because of some exams, but after June 4th it is full speed ahead. As you may know my project this year involves developing a new database backend called S4 for XMMS2. The project will be mentored by Sébastien Cevey. Some of goals of this year’s project is
- Proper support for source preferences
- A standalone S4 query layer
- Coll 2.0 support
To keep track of time we have set up some milestones with associated deadlines. The first one coming up at June 6th is to have a benchmark set up so we can track performance against the old database, but also against itself as we do changes to see if they are worth it.
I cheated a little and started early. The last week I have been trying a new approach in S4. Instead of storing the index data structures on disk as before we build them on startup. The start up takes a little longer (about 0.5 seconds on a media library with 10,000 entries), but otherwise it seems to perform better or on par with the old code using mmap. With this new approach we will hopefully get a more reliable database, smaller on disk file and some performance improvements. A more thorough analysis will be provided when I have time to run some proper benchmarks.
Happy hacking everyone!
