# Speed of beets

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [March 19, 2018, 7:11pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313 "2018-03-19T19:11:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![apastuszak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a88e4f/32.png) [@apastuszak](https://discourse.beets.io/u/apastuszak)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2018, 7:11pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/1 "2018-03-19T19:11:29Z")

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I absolutely love beets. I have dropped my whole music library in it and use it all the time. I currently have about 1900 albums in beets and tend to add 1 every week or two.

Importing a ripped CD of FLAC fies take me about 2-3 minutes to complete. And editing tags using the modify command seems to take around 5 minutes.

Considering the size of the database, are these speeds normal, or are they slower than they should be, and can I do anything to speed it up?

Can the database be optimized or compacted in any way?

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2018, 11:45pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/2 "2018-03-19T23:45:16Z")

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Yay!

There’s no easy answer to this, but if you’re interested in helping out, there certainly are ways. We could really, really use someone motivated to use a Python profiler to find bottlenecks in the common commands they use. We could use those profiling results to propose optimizations.

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**Author:** ![dorade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b3f665/32.png) [@dorade](https://discourse.beets.io/u/dorade)\
**Post date:** [March 20, 2018, 11:00pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/3 "2018-03-20T23:00:58Z")

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I’d say these speeds are normal. At least I get the same. Most of the time is used by plugins: the lyrics search and ReplayGain analysis.

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**Author:** ![apastuszak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a88e4f/32.png) [@apastuszak](https://discourse.beets.io/u/apastuszak)\
**Post date:** [March 20, 2018, 11:36pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/4 "2018-03-20T23:36:42Z")

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If you have a guide, I’d be more that willing to help.

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2018, 12:58pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/5 "2018-03-21T12:58:17Z")

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I actually think the Python documentation’s guide to using the Python profilers is pretty excellent: [https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html)

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**Author:** ![apastuszak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a88e4f/32.png) [@apastuszak](https://discourse.beets.io/u/apastuszak)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2018, 1:11pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/speed-of-beets/313/6 "2018-03-21T13:11:26Z")

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I’ll take a look when I have some time.

Andy