SongKong 1.8 with new performance status bar and improved Virtual Machine performance

Whilst SongKong works quicker when using a MusicBrainz virtual machine I confess it was not working quite as quick as I hoped, and I didn't know where the problem lay so I added some performance statistics to the new SongKong taskbar in SongKong 1.8.

MusicBrainz Delay

The MusicBrainz Delay records the additional delays added to SongKong to prevent more than one query per second being sent to MusicBrainz inline with its terms of service. When using a virtual machine the delay should have been zero, but this was not the case. This uncovered an issue that rate limiting was only disabled when doing MusicBrainz lookups, but not for searches, fixing this problem boosted performance

MusicBrainz / AcoustId / Discogs Queue

SongKong uses a number of online databases for matching songs, not just MusicBrainz. All these databases have terms and conditions that restrict usage to one query per second so if SongKong is ready to send queries more quickly than that we have to queue the tasks. This status bar shows the queue for MusicBrainz, AcoustID and Discogs databases and is updated every thirty seconds. The most important queue is the MusicBrainz queue and this can be eliminated completely by using the local MusicBrainz server.

Memory Usage

When SongKong is started the maximum memory it can ever use is specified, this is the second value displayed and SongKong can never use more memory than this regardless of how much memory your computer actually has. Whereas the first value is how much of that memory SongKong is actually using. Note that SongKong uses a garbage collector to release memory that is no longer required and this is called periodically, if SongKong is nowhere near max memory usage it tries to recover memory less often than it could, and so the current memory usage may be higher than SongKong is actually using.

On Windows you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing SongKong.ini (32-bit) and SongKong64.ini (64-bit)

On OSX you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing /Applications/SongKong.app/Info.plist

On Linux you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing songkong.sh

Other Fixes in SongKong 1.8

If you had the Update Genres option enabled it could cause Fix Songs to cancel prematurely, this is noe resolved.

If you removed all countries from Preferred Countries so that it was an empty list this will prevent Fix Songs from running