Add File Caching Options to Improve Performance

[tomfun]

Description: The app is currently difficult to use for streaming media files, such as music, due to significant lag when accessing files through WebDAV. Maybe the lack of a caching system results in poor performance.

Feature Request: Please consider adding file caching options to the app to improve performance when accessing media or large files. Some suggested caching features include:

• Max cache size: Set a limit on the amount of storage used for caching files locally.
• Cache chunk size: Allow configuration of the size of data chunks to cache during streaming or file access.
• Cache expiration: A way to set how long cached files remain before being deleted.
• Preload options: Preload the next portion of a file while the current part is playing or being accessed.

This would make the app much more usable for use cases like streaming music or video from WebDAV storage.

Why it's important: The current performance makes the app difficult to use for real-time access to large files. Implementing a caching system would help avoid frequent buffering and improve overall user experience. This feature would make the app feel more polished and worthy of a paid version.

Additional Notes:

• A toggle to disable caching for users who prefer direct access would also be helpful.
• Cache management (clear cache option) could be added to the settings menu.
• Directory based configuration

[DarremMolko]

Although not a bad idea this may be related to your internet connection or WebDAV server configuration. Are you watching 4k content? I have been using this app for 2 years and I have never experienced buffering issues (I mostly watch movies in 1080p of about 6/7 GiB, I have a 100Mbps connection).

[alexbakker]

Performance is also highly dependent on the behavior of the app that's accessing files through WebDAV Provider. For example, if the app does lots of seeking within the file and doesn't just read the file front to back for the most part, things can slow down quite a bit, because every time a seek is performed we need to establish a new HTTP connection. There's still quite a bit of room for clever improvements here to make this type of behavior have less impact, but it'd be good to know for what behavior we should optimize.

@tomfun Which music player do you experience performance issues with? And which WebDAV server are you connecting to?

[tomfun]

Actually I used AIMP for playing FLAC and mp3 320 or so from my local nextcloud (the server is not an issue). Nothing heavy. And It was lagging even with linear read!

[DarremMolko]

Did you try setting the option "maximum size of files to cache" to the minimum (5MB)? I think it lags because it's downloading the whole song to the cache before playing it (i think I experienced this once too).

[tomfun]

Did you try setting the option "maximum size of files to cache" to the minimum (5MB)? I think it lags because it's downloading the whole song to the cache before playing it

Oh.. I did opposite