Too many disk access for large collection

[mgtroyas]

Hi, Let's start saying I love Launchbox and want to use it for my DOS and Win3x game collection. it I've tried before to use Launchbox for big collections and noticed just after opening Launchbox reads no-stop from the disk. I have my collections on a NAS and Launchbox stalled and was very unresponsive all the time. But now I have created a collection of 6282 games, and at this point it's completely unusable. I left the launcher creating the thumbnails images it stores on the "cache" folder and had to stop it two days later as it hadn't finished yet. I copied over all the files to my SSD system hard disk and although everything was faster, it was still slugish anyway. I left it running few hours until it generated all the "thumbnails" on the "cache" folder and then it ran well from the SSD. But I tried copying all the collection back to the NAS and although the tumbnails weren't generated again, it was still slugish and unusable. I've used "procmon" from "Sysinternals" utilities collection by Microsoft and have seen Lunchbox executes thousands and thousands of disk I/O queries so it's hogging the disk access for normal operation. I suggest some points that could be changed to loghten disk access for big collections and/or slow disk: * On launch the program reads all the thumbnails from the collection, instead of only the ones shown, and reading the newer on scrolling. * It also generates thumbnails for all the collection on launch, it should generate them when scrolling. I'm attaching a CSV exported from procmon so you can see all the calls the program is doing continuously. I think it's room for optimization as, although people can have smaller collections or use an internal faster disk, I'm sure thery are getting a lot of disk and CPU usage. I'll be glad to gather more logs or do some testing to help with this isue.

[Jason Carr]

Hi @mgtroyas, what you're likely observing is the disk image caching. If you increase the RAM cache, in theory, there should be less and less disk access. All those images will either take up a lot of RAM, or have to be repeatedly read from disk. There's unfortunately not a lot that can be done to remedy that. Running LaunchBox from a NAS is unfortunately not a supported scenario; there's just too much bandwidth required for the images. That said, I am aware of the performance issues with large collections, and I'm currently working on optimizing it all. I'm focusing on loading and saving with large collections, though, as that is where the biggest issues lie (saving a game, for example, takes far too long with large collections). Per loading all the thumbnails instead of only the ones shown, and generating the thumbnails, that is by design and can be disabled if you turn off the RAM cache. That's what the RAM cache does; it loads as many images as will fit into the cache size into RAM in order to improve the scrolling speed. Turning the RAM cache off should stop this from happening at the expense of scrolling speed, and you should observe significantly less disk access in this scenario.