a million tracks? no issues there.
the problem comes when each of those tracks has credits with roles and those credits have connections to other albums, tracks, and compositions. Also, all those artists who are related to other artists, and how. Plus the links in bios and reviews. Plus album level credits and all the connections at that level.
Suddenly your million tracks turns into a hundred million objects with even more links. You are thinking about this problem like a traditional music player, when you should be thinking about it like wikipedia.
You remember the past very differently than I do. Things used to be slow and very limited by RAM capacity. SSDs changed that considerably.
Today, no one would ever run their “structured and full-text databases” on spinning disks. Spinning disks are a relic of the past, used for archival and low-touch data. To romanticize the past 20 years in this manner is deceptive and misleading. Seriously, what application did you use on your PC 20 years ago that handled a million tracks gracefully?
Looking at an article from 2011 that compares the performance of one of the fastest spinning drives to a lame SSD from that era, which is only 9 years ago, we are looking at the spinning disk being 60x slower.
Given that the price of the SSD today that we ask for is under $25 shipped, I’m going to stick with the idea that it’s a fair thing to ask that you not use antiques to run modern software.
It is self made. The disk storage is based on leveldb, and the rest is in-memory indicies.
I’m curious why you think it’s hard to believe?
Roon has always been about having decent hardware and focusing on pushing that hardware with software. It’s never been interesting to us to run on the hardware of generations past to save a few bucks.