Covers. Art out of an ID3 APIC frame is sized for a record sleeve: this library
averaged 3000x3000 and 580 kB per cover, 140 MB across 284 albums. The browser was
decoding nine megapixels - around 36 MB of bitmap - for every cover it painted, to show
it in a 185 px card, on a Pi with 2 GB of RAM. The largest any screen in this app asks
for is 340 px (the play view), so cache.store_cover now downscales to a 640 px long
edge, which leaves room for a tablet at devicePixelRatio 2 and cuts the decode about
twentyfold. Pillow was already a hard dependency, for colour extraction.
scan_library reuses an album whose fingerprint is unchanged without re-reading its
tags, so covers already on disk would never be rewritten - hence shrink_stored_covers(),
a pass at the top of a scan. Reading a JPEG's dimensions only parses its header, so
after the first run it costs one small read per album. Art already small enough is
returned byte-identical rather than re-encoded, so repeated scans cannot slowly grind
it down, and anything Pillow cannot read is passed through untouched: a cover that is
too big is a performance problem, a cover that is missing is a visible one.
Animation. Halving the ambient canvas to a quarter of the pixels at 30fps took it from
53.5% of a core to 25%, and 25% was still not good enough to use. A requestAnimationFrame
loop repainting the viewport is a floor you cannot get under while it runs at all, so
?pi=1 now switches it off outright rather than thinning it, along with the decorative
CSS loops, the view transitions, the typing game's bubbles and its next-key pulse. The
pets stay on screen but hold still, through the same path prefers-reduced-motion already
took - taking the animation away is the point, taking away what she earned is not.
.stage keeps its own static gradient, so there is still a sea behind everything.
Both blurs on the panels stay on. Dropping those measured five times worse.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The first cut of ?pi=1 switched off the two things that look most expensive - the
backdrop-filter glass blur and the decorative CSS animation loops - and made the device
slower, not faster: 53.5% of a core idle became 118%. Measured on musicdolphin, sum of
the Firefox process tree, idle on the browse screen, 15s average:
full app 53.5%
+ ambient canvas at half resolution 25.0% <- the whole win
+ 30fps cap on top of that 25.0% (no idle change)
+ decorative CSS animation loops off 24.6% (noise; left on)
+ backdrop-filter glass blur off 118.1% <- 5x worse
The blur is what promotes each glass panel to its own compositing layer. Without it the
animated canvas and the whole album grid above it collapse into one layer and every
canvas frame repaints all of it. The most expensive-looking CSS in the app is what was
keeping the rest of it cheap. SHOW_GLASS_BLUR and SHOW_DECORATIVE_ANIMATIONS therefore
go back to unconditionally on, in both the music app and the typing game, with the
numbers written down next to them so the next person does not repeat this.
What is left is one real change - paint a quarter of the pixels - plus three caps that
only bite while something is playing and so are not in the table above: 30fps on the
canvas, 60 bubbles alive at once, and ten progress-bar re-renders a second. Those three
are unmeasured; measuring them means playing audio.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two separate costs, both measured on musicdolphin (Pi 4, 1920x1080 kiosk), where the
app was burning ~70% of a core with nothing happening on screen.
Per-frame work. The ambient canvas repaints a full-screen gradient plus a particle
field every frame, and `usePlaybackClock` pushes a React setState per animation frame
into both PlayView and PlayerBar for the whole length of a track. `?pi=1` (lib/
lowPower.ts) makes those cheaper rather than switching them off: the canvas paints a
quarter of the pixels at 30fps with a bubble cap, and the clock renders ten times a
second - a progress bar advances one pixel every few hundred ms and its label has
one-second resolution, so nothing on screen can tell. Only the effects with no cheap
version actually go: the backdrop-filter glass blur and the decorative CSS loops.
Also drops a redundant full-canvas clearRect that the opaque gradient always covered.
Search. normalize() runs a Unicode NFD decomposition, and albumMatches/songMatches
called it on every album title and every track title on every keystroke - 4969 of them
for a track search, whose answer cannot change until the library does. buildSearchIndex
does it once per library payload; a keystroke is now String.includes over strings that
already exist. On the real library that is 33ms -> 3.4ms for an eight-letter track
query on a laptop, and this runs on a Pi. The same index partitions albums by shelf and
pre-sorts each shelf's categories, which App and BrowseView were deriving separately
from the same data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
