I have been running Slimserver on a 5-6 yr old Toshiba Portege laptop for a 
while now, and have had very acceptable performance given its spec (Pentium II 
300 MHz, with 128Mb RAM, running Win 2000).
My library is 400 albums, 5275 tracks, 220 artists, mainly FLACs with some 
MP3s, sitting on an external USB drive connected to a NSLU "slug". The 
slimserversql.db file is 6.4Mb, and slim.exe uses approx 60 Mb memory. I'm 
using a wireless squeezebox 2. 

Response is a bit slow when I turn the SB on, but I think the disk may have 
gone to sleep. Apart from the occasional slow response to remote control 
input , the SB generally works well, sounds great, and the laptop is extremely 
quiet , so its left on all the time. Browsing through the web interface is 
slow, but tolerable, given the feeble spec of the laptop.  I am currently 
running 6.2b2 4694 on the Tosh.

Ive just taken delivery of a new desktop - a Dell 5150, 3Ghz with 2Gb Ram, 
running Win XP sp 2, so I thought Id see how it compared, expecting blistering 
performance.

I dowloaded the latest version of Slimserver, 6.2.1 5024, waited for the 
rescan, and then had a play on the web interface. Initial screens were much 
quicker as expected, but then big disappointment. Once a list of albums or 
playlists was up, it takes ages to list the tracks in the album or playlist - 
anything from 7 to 15 seconds!! Thats a long time on a 3Ghz PC!

Going back to the old Toshiba, I try the same thing - initially much slower to 
display the list of artists, and their albums, but its actually quicker to 
display the list of tracks, typically 4 to 8 seconds. At this stage I'm 
confused , an old laptop with a puny spec faster than a brand new machine with 
lots of RAM ???

I tried playing around with the database cache parameter, and this seemed to 
make a bit of a difference, reducing the track display time on the new PC to 3 
to 7 seconds, but that's still much slower than I expected.
 
I did more digging and I think I have found the cause (or some of it anyway). 
I turned on some debug (d_info as a very lucky first guess). Slimserver checks 
that each track in the album, or playlist exists and hasn't changed (size or 
timestamp). This is what takes the time - on my setup, going off to the NSLU 
and external disc, following the file path through 6 levels of folder to find 
the track, just to see if it has changed.
Is this expected behaviour?. At first glance, I wouldn't have thought it was.

I would much prefer that Slimserver listed what was in the database, rather 
than going off to the diskstore. If something has changed on the disc, I can 
manualy rescan, or rely on the overnight rescan. 

But then maybe there is a real need to do this.