Launchbox very slow over NAS

[maks]

I'm a Hyperspin user and have my complete setup on a QNAP NAS. Emulators, Hyperspin, RocketLauncher, Media, and Roms are all on the NAS. Two PCs are connected to this setup locally via gigabit ethernet, the NAS is a Network Mapped Drive and its location is allowed in my Anti-virus. Hyperspin launches in 5 seconds, UI responds to navigation right away, wheels move smoothly, videos appear within 1 second, and games launch right away: QNAP TS-251+ (NAS) PC #1 Alienware Alpha i3, SSD, 8gb ram (arcade cabinet) PC #2 Asus Maximus V i5 2500k, 16gb ram Launchbox issue I installed Launchbox-lite to my NAS in the same network mapped drive folder. Nintendo NES is setup along with artwork and videos. Both PCs can run launchbox but im getting severe performance issues. It takes at least 5 seconds to move to each game, loading artwork around 3 seconds each, and launching an NES rom at least 20 seconds. I gave it time to cache but still slow. If i copy Launchbox locally onto my PC it performs fine but this is definitely not what i want. Any ideas on what could be going wrong here? I have friends coming to town next week that want to create their own arcade setup like mine but hyperspin is too much of a chore. I want to show Launchbox instead but this is unusable for me. I would love to upgrade to Premium and use big box but i gotta get lite version to perform well on my NAS first. Thanks in advance!

[DOS76]

Your best bet would be to install LB locally but leave your emulators and ROMs on the NAS I have a few systems setup like that NES being one of them and it works flawlessly when grabbing the games from my Windows Home Server 2011 machine. I know this probably isn't the answer that your looking for but at this time LB is just not optimized to run from a server.

[SentaiBrad]

So certainly we probably could do a bit more optimization for over the network systems, but LaunchBox desires more power in all respects than you would think. Your server is over Gigabit, but what is the port like on your systems? Are they even Ethernet at all or Wireless? What is your average speed to your server and is your LaunchBox still trying to cache? My guess, if you've just set everything up, is that LaunchBox is still trying to cache but doesn't have the HDD speed and so it's taking a bit longer and this will certainly give you performance issues. The other thing to note is that once you get a library of over at least 8k items, performance will start to go down a bit because if the large library and the way LaunchBox handles everything. Performance is not bad though locally, I have a 33k library with a really good computer and it perfoms well when not caching. Over a network though may be a differnt story.

[spektor56]

Jason actually talked about this on the live stream today and said that LB will have performance issues when being run from a NAS because the image caching wont be local.

[SentaiBrad]

I missed the stream, but that was my guess.

[Zombeaver]

I know this isn't the answer you were looking for but, as an alternative, you may want to look into Steam's In Home Streaming for use with Launchbox/Big Box. I use a Steam Link with it (which is basically just a cheap box that you can connect to a TV and make use of Steam IHS, as opposed to a PC/laptop) but if you're just wanting to play on other computers on your network, you don't need that - you can just install Steam on the host computer and any computers that you want to stream to and you'll be good to go. You just add Launchbox/Big Box as a "non-steam application" and you're set. In Home Streaming is basically a remote desktop application except that it's specifically designed for gaming - you connect a controller to the client machine (it needs to have Xinput support, so a 360 controller is ideal) and then start a stream from the host machine; your inputs are relayed from the client to the host with practically no noticeable input delay - I was playing Contra 3 on mine last night, believe me, you'd notice if there was lag - and the video is streamed back to the client. You won't have the performance issue that you're currently having because you're not actually running LB/BB over the network, you're running it on the host PC, and sending inputs to it over the network. This would, of course, require that you move your library and LB/BB off of your NAS and onto one of your PCs, which could be a pain, but I can attest to this setup being a viable option.

[maks]

Thanks for the replies everyone. SentaiBrad, i am connected via ethernet with gigabit ports on both router and PCs, i get around 100mb transfer speeds. I messed around with the setup a bit more and as some have mentioned it appears to be related to the location of Media. I started a simple test trying out DOS76's setup... *I copied the Launchbox folder to my local PC and set the emulator and game folders to the NAS. At this point many NES images were already cached so launching games ended up working fine. *Next, I set just one Artwork folder (the one represented in Launchbox UI when navigating games) to point to the NAS and started having performance issues. I waited a little longer in case it needed to re-cache but it was still too problematic. The Launchbox Media folder would be a bit too large for my SSD once I'm fully setup. I'm hopeful at some point in the future Launchbox can be optimized for setups like mine. I'll see if there's a request for it in the 'Feature Requests' section. Since Hypserspin works great I'm optimistic that Launchbox can too :)

[SentaiBrad]

We've had requests for this in the past, and we certainly do want to make this better, but I am unsure how much we'll actually be able to do. Jason might have a different perspective on that than me because he's the Developer, but my assumption is not too much.