nikpmr Posted March 24, 2016 Author Share Posted March 24, 2016 Launchbox 5.5 took about 5 seconds to start; with 5.8 it takes about 10 seconds. Is there any reason for this and any possible way to speed things up? I have about 300 games in my XML file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted March 24, 2016 Share Posted March 24, 2016 Mine takes even longer than that but once it starts its quick and responsive so I don't have any issues with it. Some programs take a little time to start. At 300 games i doubt very much that the size of your XML has anything to do with the slow down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FistyDollars Posted March 24, 2016 Share Posted March 24, 2016 I've been noticing this as well, actually. I've got Launchbox installed on an SSD, and it still takes like 15-20 seconds to load. Of course, I've got approx. 6000 games in my XML, so maybe this is the best I can hope for. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted March 24, 2016 Share Posted March 24, 2016 As we get more feature rich or we implement behind the scenes features sometimes they can slow things down. Before the final release Jason can look and review the code he's recently implemented to find ways to speed things back up a bit. Sometimes this isn't possible at the time and is possible in later versions. 5.5 was closely after the big speed up of the program. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted March 25, 2016 Share Posted March 25, 2016 I took a quick look at the startup process for this latest beta while I was adding the splash screen. I did speed it up a tad bit, but probably not significantly. The difference between the startup performance in 5.5 vs. 5.8 is that we added a lot more built-in metadata (for MAME, the LocalDB, etc.). It's loading up this metadata at startup and that's what's making it take longer. I'll see if there's anything I can do to lazy load it or optimize it further soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nikpmr Posted March 27, 2016 Author Share Posted March 27, 2016 Cool. I appreciate you looking into this. This is such a great little app. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted March 27, 2016 Share Posted March 27, 2016 nikpmr said Cool. I appreciate you looking into this. This is such a great little app. Of course, we enjoy helping out our users as much as we can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FranzShester Posted April 27, 2016 Share Posted April 27, 2016 at the end i wasn´t the only one who noticed that as I said in an old topic .. for me was the 5.6 version the perfect release... Launchbox was then very very fast ... now im on 5.10 and it starts up a bit faster than 5.7-5.9 but nothing like before :( with this new boot screen i have noticed that it takes the most part of the time when the message "populating emulators" is being displayed (and I only have 3 emulators linked to launchbox). So i though posting that information could be helpful in order to solve this "issue" :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted April 27, 2016 Share Posted April 27, 2016 Yes, LaunchBox loads up its metadata during the "Populating Emulators" stage, so it makes sense that it takes the majority of the time. I will come back to startup performance at some point in the future, but for now we have more important fish to fry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowfire Posted May 4, 2016 Share Posted May 4, 2016 Came here because I have exactly the same issue but on my system the "populating settings" stage seems to take longest (or at least as long as the "populating emulators" stage). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted May 4, 2016 Share Posted May 4, 2016 How long do you consider long? It is probably normal, LaunchBox has to load a lot of data at start. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted May 4, 2016 Share Posted May 4, 2016 Speed varies by PC specs I have tablets with small libraries that take longer to load than my HTPC with 19K games and laptops seem slower than the desktop faster than a tablet so it all seems normal to me. I don't know if it is the extra RAM, the CPU power or a combo of both but the better the machine the faster the load at least in my experience Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted May 4, 2016 Share Posted May 4, 2016 In this case it should be CPU, but more RAM might be helpful. It's just not an easy to answer question. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowfire Posted May 4, 2016 Share Posted May 4, 2016 SentaiBrad said How long do you consider long? It is probably normal, LaunchBox has to load a lot of data at start. I run Launchbox on Windows startup along with Steam (I use Windows solely for gaming) and I noticed it took substantial longer for Launchbox to finish loading than before, somewhere around the version that came with the loading screen. Before it took Steam longer to be ready than Launchbox, now Launchbox takes about 30 sec - 1 minute longer than Steam to be ready. Overall Windows takes between 2 to 3 minutes to load everything on startup. (Judging by my patience it used to be much shorter ;) ) (Edited:) I have removed Launchbox from autostartup to test it independently and (after a reboot and waiting for other startup programs to finish loading) it takes a minute to launch. More than half of that is "Populating settings" Specs: Windows 7 64bit, core i7, 8GB ram, HDD harddisk. Launchbox has 352 games: 117 Windows, 69 MS-DOS, 83 MAME, 66 c64, 17 other Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted May 5, 2016 Share Posted May 5, 2016 Yeah that machine should be loading up 352 games much faster than that have you checked you disk for any errors lately not that there is a problem but some missing info on a bad sector or 2 may cause the reading of the XML to slow down. Edit: However all of my machines are using a SSD so maybe that is the reason I see superior speeds but for some reason I still don't think that adds up due to the machine and the minuscule amount of games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowfire Posted May 5, 2016 Share Posted May 5, 2016 Thanks for the advice, but no bad sectors found. I've done some additional testing and after a reboot and after most disc activity has settled according to the resource monitor it seems that disc-loading spike (of Launchbox.exe and metadata.xml) is 1/3 of the 60 seconds at most. (Note that this is after a reboot, launching a second time obviously goes much faster (a few seconds) because it's cached.) But the main reason why I posted is that it seems to me that Launchbox is getting (noticeably) slower starting up with recent versions and I suspect it could be related to this forum thread rather than some recent incident on my system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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