Performance of GoFlex net

[karlitos]

Hello

I'm thinking about byuing a GoFlex net and installing Arch Linux ARM install Linux. However the GoFlex net has only 128M RAM so I was wondering how good or bad the performance of the unit is. I would like to use 2 encrypted SATA drives and run SAMBA, Cherokee, Transmission, pyLoad and even Firefly on the device. If the instalation into the NAND instalation will set up a RAM disk, how much RAM will be left for the os and the apps ?

I do not really care if the device would be a little bit slow. But I'm using a WD Mybook with custom linux on it and it is a very poorly designed device with only 32MB RAM. The common issue is, that Transmission or lighttpd are crashing due to the lack of memory.

Anyone has experience with the GoFlex net ?

Greetings K

[peaslaker]

Default settings for ramdisk usage are to max out at 50% of real memory. The memory only gets used when there are files taking up the space, so the majority of memory is available to applications. There usually isn't any sense in having applications write anything to the ramdisk. You should set up appropriate mounts in /etc/fstab to handle application writes. Then you just have to worry about system log files, so log rotation should be implemented and enforced for all logs on fairly restrictive settings.

[karlitos]

Thanks for reply

I would like to use the GoFlex net with two SATA discs in RAID and make a SWAP and set mounts for the application writes. But anyhow, how is the performance in general ? Now I read about the tonido application and I found it just great. Si, would it be possible to launch Cherokee, SAMBA, tonido, Firefly and Transmission simultaneously on the GoFlex net, or has the device not eoungh power or memory for so much services at once ? I do not matter if the system reactions or the data transfer speeds would not be the fastest. I just do not want to buy a device, which will hase a restricted usage due to lack of performance. In this case bying of a miniITX Atom powered board seems to be a better alternative, unfortunately more power consuming.

[peaslaker]

I'm a contributing developer on the forked-daapd project that started where firefly left off. I've tuned the database behind forked-daapd to work effectively on my GoFlex Net platform and it has a minimal memory footprint. It has been tested with a media library of 300,000 songs.

Where it gets interesting is that forked-daapd isn't just a "Shared Library" implementation. It actually runs the DAAP , RAOP and RACP protocols effectively mimicking the way iTunes communicates with networked devices. i.e. you can run Apple Remote on an iPod Touch against a forked-daapd instance. With USB sound (again easy to achieve), this gives you a very nice network accessible music player. It also does multi-room over AirTunes (I think we're supposed to call it AirPlay these days) to connected devices like Airport Express devices and Apple TV. It is still under development, but it is aiming to give native video streaming to Apple TV.

I have tested it with Apple Lossless, AAC and mp3 sources and it handles them all with ease. It is a bit between versions at the moment. The last published release of 0.12 predates my involvement tuning the database and is not usable on an embedded platform. The next release should bring all the good stuff out into the open.