input/cache: first draft of the file cache

This commit is contained in:
Max Kellermann
2019-05-08 18:39:00 +02:00
parent e8a0ce643a
commit 5d74b5cee1
27 changed files with 880 additions and 6 deletions

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@@ -334,6 +334,39 @@ The following table lists the input options valid for all plugins:
More information can be found in the :ref:`input_plugins` reference.
Configuring the Input Cache
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The input cache prefetches queued song files before they are going to
be played. This has several advantages:
- risk of buffer underruns during playback is reduced because this
decouples playback from disk (or network) I/O
- bulk transfers may be faster and more energy efficient than loading
small chunks on-the-fly
- by prefetching several songs at a time, the hard disk can spin down
for longer periods of time
This comes at a cost:
- memory usage
- bulk transfers may reduce the performance of other applications
which also want to access the disk (if the kernel's I/O scheduler
isn't doing its job properly)
To enable the input cache, add an ``input_cache`` block to the
configuration file:
.. code-block:: none
input_cache {
size "1 GB"
}
This allocates a cache of 1 GB. If the cache grows larger than that,
older files will be evicted.
Configuring decoder plugins
---------------------------