Holiday Present: performance improvements with a cheer from Amahi!

Today we are happy to introduce three things: A makeover for Amahi’s web site, a major performance improvement to Greyhole, the technology used in Amahi for Storage Pooling, and two important beta releases: the preview of the next major version of Greyhole and Mediatomb, an on-the-fly transcoding DNLA server!

First, check out the brand-spanking-new Amahi site: new logo, new overall look, better organization and navigation, and foremost, a much improved app store, one of our most frequent requests.

Many many thanks for the donations, for the reviews and the encouragement! We hope you like it!

New App Store

The biggest change is Amahi’s App Store, one of the largest of its kind!  We are adding more categories, a new slick page design for each of the apps, and on top of it all, it’s searchable.

The search box has already had over 1500 searches in just a few days! Welcome to the new Amahi App Store!  There are more features to come, … soon!

Greyhole Update

Today we have released Greyhole, 0.7.5. This new version, along with We would like to welcome a number of new users coming from the Windows Home Server world. We posted a migration guide by popular demand and it has revealed one weakness in the way we implemented Greyhole in Amahi by default.

Many WHS users with large existing data stores wanted to migrate their large collection of data, but the default Greyhole configuration in Amahi did not tolerate a massive migration well.  The load that the network copy created, especially on today’s fast networks, would often overrun the pace at which local data copying and replication takes place in Greyhole.  The cause of this bottleneck was a decision we made early on to use sqlite3, as a back-end for Greyhole out of a caution for reliability (something Amahi cares a lot).  The idea was to keep it as simple as possible, and not rely on another layer or dependency as a data management for Greyhole (MySQL).

As Greyhole was put to the test recently, it became clear that for performance purposes, MySQL was the much better choice.  Greyhole’s performance with MySQL is 330+ file transactions per second, an improvement over sqlite3’s 11 transactions per second.  Note that this is not data transfer rate but the rate at which file operations can be managed. Quite a staggering 30x improvement!

Today we’re releasing a new release of Greyhole (0.7.5) and a corresponding Amahi platform release (5.6.5) supporting Greyhole using MySQL as the back-end (though not by default yet). Also included are language translations for Russian and Swedish … thanks to our translations team!

Here is how to transition an existing system from sqlite to MySQL.

Two new Betas: Greyhole 0.8 and Mediatomb

Partly as a result of the performance analysis, we not have a new beta of Greyhole 0.8. In version 0.8, Greyhole now use spool files to log those operations. This is similar to how email servers work, and will makes Greyhole more efficient. If you crave the latest, the downloads are here: 32bit x86, 64bit x86-64, arm (for the plug computer).

For members of our beta program, check out Mediatomb, a UPnP/DLNA media server that works well with the Sony PS3. It can even transcode media on the fly, including many 1080p MKV streams! This is a very promising application, packaged by SolaR with great help from the community. Thanks!

For the latest from our community, we have ZNC (a personal IRC “bouncer” server), DaDaBIK, and for the true hacker in you Debian Lenny Network Installer. Lots of the community contributing apps!

Special Thanks

We would like to give special thanks to the team that helped us tune up the new site, provide feedback and polish things up!

Thanks to Guillaume and the small dedicated legion of recent Amahi converts for their enthusiasm and of course for a great effort in narrowing down this performance bottleneck and for providing a Greyhole migration script! Incidentally, Greyhole got a new web page too!

Happy Holidays to you if you are celebrating at this time of the year! Cheers!

The Amahi Team

14 comments

  1. santa Dec 13

    great, but the link to the script to upgrade greyhole..where is it?

    MIA:
    db_migration-sqlite2mysql.sh

  2. John Dec 13

    If I have an existing install, will the 0.7.5 Greyhole update (MySQL) automatically update my existing install? Or,must I follow the instruction in the “transition an existing system…” link to take advantage of this function… I have 5 Tb’s I’m migrating right now and it is S-L-O-W…

    Thanks.

    John

  3. Max Dec 13

    When will be made GUI for disk management?
    Thanks.

  4. Jake Dec 13

    I am looking for the script to update to sql. I do not see it yet, what is the version number of amahi that includes the new version of greyhole?

  5. cpg Dec 13

    @Jake @santa You should see this:
    $ rpm -q hda-greyhole
    hda-greyhole-0.7.6-1.x86_64

    and the script is in
    /usr/share/greyhole/db_migration-sqlite2mysql.sh

  6. dizzy1 Dec 13

    Very nice updates here. Her’s hoping that mysql is the default for greyhole by Christmas!

  7. Jimmyh Dec 13

    It seems there is a new version out
    hda-platform-5.6.3-1.noarch.rpm 13-Dec-2010 04:41 1.0M

    Why isnt this mentioned? Or am I missing something

  8. cpg Dec 13

    @Jimmy We just released a fix for a bug we introduced today. A translation tool was slipped into the release by accident. This release also included updates to the Russian and Swedish translation and the tool we use for translation slipped in as a requirement.

    The regular updates should pick it up soon, otherwise you can yum -y update “hda-*” (though you may have to yum clean metadata) to bypass any local caching.

  9. Jimmyh Dec 13

    Now v5.6.11-1 is out and working fine.

  10. Adam Dec 14

    I’m one of those WHS users that ran into this bug this update corrects. I just want to make sure I am running this update properly.

    To update greyhole I run:

    rpm -q hda-greyhole
    hda-greyhole-0.7.6-1.x86_64
    /usr/share/greyhole/db_migration-sqlite2mysql.sh

    and then run:
    yum -y update “hda-*” // to update the hda

    Correct?

  11. Sharron Clemons Dec 21

    It seems there is a new version out hda-platform-5.6.3-1.noarch.rpm 13-Dec-2010 04:41 1.0M Why isnt this mentioned? Or am I missing something

  12. cpg Dec 21

    @Sharron Yes, we released a new version because there were some bits still from F14 left in there. Fixed now. We had one day where installations were not working well due to this.

  13. Alice Mar 27

    I will try again when I get home from work. The USB install uses the Fedora Full DVD image, so it must be a Fedora repo issue. Hopefully when I try it tonight, php-mbstring will be available in the repo my system selects.

    I wonder if it is the installation repo that does not have php-mbstring. That is all that is typically selected for install. When I selected Fedora 14 repo in addition, it worked. So makes me think we either need to host php-mbstring on Amahi or add to the instructions to select the extra repo. I would recommend the former as the ideal solution.

  14. cpg Mar 27

    @Alice: FYI, the USB install method has been very problematic for a long time. I would not dare to debug it here, but feel free to file a bug if you are technical and we can help wade through the issues one at a time. We can’t drive with this, though, as we have tried a few times … this page on USB install may help.

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