Imgema Posted June 12, 2016 Author Share Posted June 12, 2016 I love many things about Launchbox but the one thing that bothers me the most about it is that, compared to other frontends i use, it's the slowest to navigate. For instance, it takes about 3 to 4 whole seconds to show my game collection when i click each system. I'm not using Big Box mode as i haven't bought the program yet. Before Launchbox i used QuickPlay (the fastest/snappiest frontend i ever used) and i still use it actually. The time it takes to switch systems is practically non-existent. Not even 0.1 seconds. This makes Launchbox very hard to get used to after using Quickplay for more than 5 years. Now, i'm not saying it should be as fast as QuickPlay since Launchbox is a more "eye candy" frontend but i feel like 3 seconds of lag on a i5 computer (4 seconds on my Core 2 Duo) every time i click on something to show up is a bit excessive. So i wonder if i'm doing something wrong or if there are ways to make the GUI navigation a bit snappier than that. Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 12, 2016 Share Posted June 12, 2016 How big is your library? In truth, there is probably more optimization that can be done but LaunchBox is extremely complicated. The first big slow down comes from Library size. The larger the library, especially on weaker systems, the slower it will move. If you've just added games and it is still caching this will decrease performance a lot as well. Scrolling through and waiting till caching is over would be a more apt test (if you even are at all). The Hard Drive LaunchBox is on can make a difference. SATA3, SSD's and USB3 Hard Drives performing the best. You can try turning your RAM Cache up to max or off, depending on the machine this can increase performance as well. Do you have any active scanning Software? AV Software that constantly sits and scans, RAM Monitoring software that actively cleans, or anything similar can also bring down performance more signifigantly than you would think. Those are just some more basic things a user can do though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted June 12, 2016 Author Share Posted June 12, 2016 Thanks for the reply. -I have a SATA3 mechanical HDD (1TB) -I have AVAST installed but the partition where Launchbox is located is in the exceptions list. -I don't have any RAM monitoring process. Also, the system is clean, with less than 45 processes on startup (Windows 7 64bit) with no processes taking up CPU time. -I don't add any new games, this is the performance after everything is done and even after cashing all images as well. -I have a large collection overall but it doesn't seem to have any difference clicking to a small list or a big list. For instance, in my PS2 list i have only 14 games. It still takes 3 seconds to show up, just like in my larger lists. -I did increase RAM cache from 512MB (default) to 1GB, though i didn't feel much difference tbh. Maybe i should increase it further since i have 16GB? How much is more than enough? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 12, 2016 Share Posted June 12, 2016 I have mine set to 4GB personally. And it's the size of your entire library, not the system you are clicking in to. The specfic system could have 1 game or 100, it is based on your entire library. We have been noticing (especially in BigBox) that users have been having better performance in Windows 8 and 10 due to the back end performance upgrades that Windows has received. Obviously im not saying you need to upgrade Windows, but we have seen lower performance. I've also seen AV software do what it wants regardless of Whitelisting. I've personally never had issues with Malwarebytes Antimalware, so much so I purchased it. A user had added LaunchBox Setup and the destination folder to his Whitelist (I don't remember their AV specifically) but only after he turned it off completely did LaunchBox actually install. We had to take Anti Piracy measures, and ever since it's tripped up AV software with lots of false positives and odd behavior. Other than potentially an SSD for your LB install, I am unsure if there is going to be too much more than that. At a certain point without potentially more optimization, which we can always try and do more, the bigger the library the slower LaunchBox will respond. Personally I have over 30k games in my library, and while changing platforms can take a few seconds I never thought of it as a bad thing. That's obviously just me though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted June 12, 2016 Author Share Posted June 12, 2016 Yeah it must be the library size since even if i disable Avast completely and increase RAM cache further makes no difference. Although my library is smaller than yours (7k games here) i suppose it's still a lot. I need to test a fresh setup with less games (say a few dozen for each system) to see how big of a difference this makes. Thankfully it should be easy since the program is portable. Or maybe there is no issue here at all and it's just me. I've been spoiled by QuickPlay all these years and maybe it's that difference that bothers me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 12, 2016 Share Posted June 12, 2016 Yae to be honest, there are things we can do to alleviate or make things better (like SSD's) but the software is the software at a certain point. We load lots of media and metadata. The speed and age of your CPU, the speed and age of your GPU, the speed of your RAM and then your OS is probably the list of most important things that can play factors in to it. We know for example, that BigBox performs way better on Windows 10 than Vista or 7 due to all the backend stuff they did. Our list is long, but Jason does want to tackle Performance again at some point. It's also worth noting that BigBox also inherently does the same tasks differently than LaunchBox does, so you may find it to be smoother in there if you do decide to upgrade to Premium. If you don't like it we can offer you a refund if it doesn't end up working the way you want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted June 12, 2016 Author Share Posted June 12, 2016 SentaiBrad said The speed and age of your CPU, the speed and age of your GPU, the speed of your RAM and then your OS is probably the list of most important things that can play factors in to it. We know for example, that BigBox performs way better on Windows 10 than Vista or 7 due to all the backend stuff they did. I have two computers with a pretty big gap in performance. PC1: i5 4670, 16GB DDR3, GTX 960, Windows 7, 1TB SATA3 Disk. PC2: Core 2 Duo E8500, 4GB DDR2 (or 3 i'm not sure), 8800GT, Windows 7, 250GB SATA 1 Disk. I copied-pasted my whole setup from PC1 to PC2 in a partition that has the same letter, so all paths are correct. And honestly, the difference in performance is very small. Maybe it's a half second slower. But the performance is similar after caching is completed (caching takes a lot longer on PC2). So i don't know. I feel like what makes the most difference would be a SSD drive maybe. I will test the program in Windows 10 soon though. . SentaiBrad said Our list is long, but Jason does want to tackle Performance again at some point. It's also worth noting that BigBox also inherently does the same tasks differently than LaunchBox does, so you may find it to be smoother in there if you do decide to upgrade to Premium. If you don't like it we can offer you a refund if it doesn't end up working the way you want. I'm pretty happy with the program regardless. I'm planning to get the Big Box version at some point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 12, 2016 Share Posted June 12, 2016 Yea caching is almost completely CPU Speed and Disk speed. However, that's caching. You may still get more performance on an SSD still, but I am unsure by how much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted July 10, 2016 Author Share Posted July 10, 2016 The last few days i was fiddling with OpenEmu on a friend's mac. I made a few full setups with it like NES, Genesis, SNES, etc. OpenEmu looks very similar to LaunchBox visually. It also displays hundreds of box art at a time. But it's much faster. It doesn't take 4 seconds to browse from one system to another, in fact it's almost instant. Also, it doesn't load/cache the assets every time i load the program. In LaunchBox i have to wait for several minutes before my UI runs smoothly again, because it has to go through all assets every time i start the program or something. After using OpenEmu for a couple of days, LaunchBox feels too "heavy" and sluggish. Sorry if this sounds dismissive i'm not trying to downplay LaunchBox, besides it has it's own strengths and OpenEmu has it's own problems as well. The reason i'm bringing this up is that if it's possible for OpenEmu to be so fast while handling about as much assets as LaunchBox does, then maybe Launchbox can be faster too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted July 22, 2016 Author Share Posted July 22, 2016 So, it seems like version 6.3 is a bit faster overall for me. I feel like the wait time to display a different system from the list is cut down for about 1 second. So now it takes 2, 2.5 seconds. Which is still a tad slow but it's getting there. Did you boys made some optimizations or is it my imagination? Anyone else can confirm the UI being a bit faster? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted July 28, 2016 Author Share Posted July 28, 2016 I'm bumping this once more to say that in the latest version (6.4) going to a different system seems to take less than 1 second. Basically, the program is about 4 times faster/more responsive since i made this thread, at least when i browse through systems. Good job on those optimizations so far guys. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rincewind Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 The best thing I did was transfer the whole of Windows and Launchbox to an SSD drive. It's now running great and on an old core2 duo, with just 2gb of ram. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Hi @Imgema, the only thing I can think of that might have improved the speed in the latest releases is that we upgraded the .NET framework version to 4.6.1. That could certainly make a big difference with performance, though, so I bet that's it. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted August 6, 2016 Author Share Posted August 6, 2016 Testing version 6.7 and there seems to be a regression. The program now is slower than 6.6, taking 2 seconds (instead of previously 1) each time i click on different systems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nielk1 Posted August 16, 2016 Share Posted August 16, 2016 I have a lot of items in my library right now (27907 though I am cleaning it out a bit) and I have some major slowdown as expected. I'm not sure where the slowdown is though so I can't make a specific suggestion. If the problem is in parsing the library data, I'd suggest placing that operation in a thread so the UI does not freeze while it is working. This would also allow for canceling of the thread if the user changes their selection while it's busy. You would need to get a nice mutex lock on the library data though which could get messy if you haven't already threaded that. If the issue is the customized ListView my only guess would be you're not using virtual mode. Given the speed of the program overall I presume you are using virtual mode though, so that's likely not the issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 16, 2016 Share Posted August 16, 2016 Thank you guys, I'll be back to performance adjustments soon. The performance issues are almost entirely due to data processing and the fact that we're not using an actual database. There are always ways to speed things up, though, so I'll be back to this soon. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sepulchre Posted August 17, 2016 Share Posted August 17, 2016 I have a relatively large library as well. For me, BigBox slows down significantly when moving through the different letters (A-Z) in the quick search (coverflow w/ details), not the full search. I cannot quickly move from letter to letter without significant pauses between many letters. Platforms can have between 700-1300 games and have fan art as the background and game videos enabled. Does BigBox need to cache the different letter "bookmarks" to transition smoothly? Windows 10 x64 i5-2500 12GB DDR3 7200RPM HDD 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 17, 2016 Share Posted August 17, 2016 Good to know, @Sepulchre. I have a feeling that the performance issue is most likely due to the Coverflow controls. How quick does it work for you for the other views? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted August 24, 2016 Author Share Posted August 24, 2016 (edited) Are there any performance improvements planned for version 6.9? 6.8 feels a little bit slower to me compared to 6.7 (normal view). The fastest/snappiest version was 6.6. Edited August 24, 2016 by Imgema Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imgema Posted September 17, 2016 Author Share Posted September 17, 2016 (edited) 6.9 seems to be the slowest version yet. It takes 3 full seconds (sometimes 4) to change a system list. I'm assuming performance/optimisations is on a low priority lately? Edited September 17, 2016 by Imgema Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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