Launchbox slowed down too much when I got over ~12,000 games in the menu

[Evil_Orko]

I am running a modest system - an i3 with 4gb ram.  Launchbox works great for me and has since I started, all the way until I added eXoDOS in, and now it is really running too slow to use, and I haven't even added in MAME, amiga, c64, or a bunch of other large systems yet!!  I'm not 100% sure what's going on, but it seems that all the games we enter go into the same database and is slowing everything down too much to be usable any more.  Am I on the right track?  Are all the games we enter going into one big database file?  Is there any way to split it off into multiple database files, one per system, just to speed things up a little?  I may be totally off track, and I'm sorry if I am. 

Maybe I am missing a setting or just under-spec.  Thanks for any info you guys may have.  Launchbox really is the easiest and most feature complete frontend I have found, I really hope I can continue with it at some point.

[ckp]

I think you are correct. lunchbox.xml has everything. What exactly is moving slowly for you? 

Is it just when you startup Launchbox, or changing Platforms, or other?

There may be some things you can do to help, but first it might be helpful to know just which things are slow.

 

[Evil_Orko]

Hi, thanks for the reply.  Everything from the startup, to changing between systems, to going between games, and even launching them.  The worst offender would be just navigation.  Just clicking a game can take 45 seconds or more to show the information, artwork, and video.

 Like I say, it did work fine when it was around 8 or 10 thousand, then I added eXoDOS and it just added too many.  But if it wasn't eXoDOS then it would have been MAME or Amiga or c64 since they have a ton of games, too.  I had to stop adding games and re-evaluate frontends, as I really just want an all-encompassing retro front-end. 

 

Thanks again.

[DOS76]

Yeah that doesn't sound right. I have LB around 20k games on a few systems and it isn't close to being unusable have you tried playing with the RAM cache setting under tools<options that usually fixes me up but I only need to use that on my tablets with 1 and 2GB of memory

[Evil_Orko]

Thanks for the tip, I just adjusted it to 1gb and tried it, but it didn't help, so I turned the feature off and tried it and it still didn't work.  I did notice that the videos were on Windows Media Player instead of VLC, but changing that back didn't help, either.  Scrolling is really slow.  I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX650 GPU, so that shouldn't be it, either.  I am running on Windows 10 x64.  I have the Anniversary update, as well. 

[DOS76]

Have you checked to see if there are any new drivers for your card or if you just updated your video drivers maybe that is the issue. I'm at a loss and trying to come up with anything that might help.

[Evil_Orko]

ironically, i am updating the video driver now to see if that will help.  I will let you know shortly.   Thanks again for trying to help!

[Evil_Orko]

it is still quite unresponsive.  I'm at a loss.  

[Rincewind]

How much ram do you have installed and what is the cache set to in the settings?

[Evil_Orko]

i have 4gb ram and the setting for cache is at the default of 512mb

[Evil_Orko]

i am running it with everything closed, as well.  no browser, steam, etc.

 

[Evil_Orko]

i got it to run a little better by zooming in a bunch.  i can now only see 3x3 at a time, but at least i can scroll through them.  for now, lol.  I am going to add in the other games this week and see if it goes back to being slow again after I add another 10,000 games or so, lol.

[Rincewind]

I only have 4gb of ram and have the cache set too 2gb, might help. I have 16,000 games and it runs ok, also I make sure that when I add a new platform and games that I scroll through the list making sure all the images load (cache) before I use Launchbox, I don't know if it makes much difference but when I re-scroll the images are already loaded if that makes sence

[Evil_Orko]

thanks, I will give that a shot as well, now that I have gotten it a little better.  I am adding in Amiga CD32 right now, but will test that after this step is done.  

[Evil_Orko]

14 minutes ago, Rincewind said:

I only have 4gb of ram and have the cache set too 2gb, might help. I have 16,000 games and it runs ok, also I make sure that when I add a new platform and games that I scroll through the list making sure all the images load (cache) before I use Launchbox, I don't know if it makes much difference but when I re-scroll the images are already loaded if that makes sence

wow, that actually works great!  I'm scanning for games still and i can scroll through just fine, as long as it's been cached first.  Is there any way to cache the whole list when you choose a system? 

[ckp]

I have 14k games not hidden. I have 4 game tiles wide showing. I have the default 512MB RAM set. I'm very hesitant to give it any more, although things might go a little faster for me.

When I click on a game, the details and video comes up pretty quickly (a second or two).

When I switch platforms, it takes a fairly long time (longer since upgrading from 6.8 to 6.9).

I doubt that I would use any application that required 2GB of RAM to work well. I'm hopeful and confident that the LB devs will improve performance as time goes on.

I would hope this issue is caused by something else. 2GB of RAM is a very large amount of your system memory to reserve for a single application.

Disk throughput can be a big factor here.

What type of disk drive do you have these components on: Launchbox install, LB image cache, game media?

Since you are running Windows 10, it "should" mean your disk drives are not too fragmented because Win 10 automatically defragments, but you might want to try closing down everything and running a defrag on your drives. 

When Windows and apps move unusually slow, a lot of times I've seen that caused by bad data on the disk. Running 'chkdsk /F c:' (replace c for each drive letter you have, one at a time) will correct disk issues and your system may hugely benefit. I would try that.

See if there are any .NET Framework updates and/or patches not yet installed (although i doubt it with Win10 since it comes automatically).

Exclude any LB related folders from anti virus scanners.

Running LB, image cache, and media from a faster drive, like SSD, may help too.

Lastly, running in BigBox mode will probably alleviate this issue for you, but I'm guessing you like to use the non Bigbox mode.

[Evil_Orko]

Thanks for the tips.  

I have everything on different drives.  My main installation and all the artwork and videos are on my main hard drive, a 7200 rpm 1tb WD with ~125gb free.  My rom based games are on the same drive, my CD/DVD based systems are on 2 different USB drives.  Big Box does run much better, but still laggy every once in a while.  Nothing to worry about yet.  I do like LaunchBox on my desktop, since I have to use that to set it up anyway.  I went premium for BigBox for possibly using it in my MAME cabinet and maybe doing a HTPC.  And to support the devs.

[Rincewind]

LaunchBox / BigBox needs to access the image files very quickly so your best bet is to have your installation on a drive that can read very quickly so an SSD would be better in my opinion. Luckily if you ever did make the move you can simply drag your LaunchBox folder over to the new drive but will need to make sure your ROM paths are correct. 

As and example if your installation is on a F: drive now and you add a SSD as your main C: drive then your ROM paths will still be pointing to the F: drive which will be fine.

But if it's already on a C: drive and the Roms are too then you would need to change the ROM paths

[Evil_Orko]

I noticed that the new beta of LaunchBox has some improvements in performance.  I now have ~26,000 games in after adding PSP, C64, and a few others.  Amiga and MAME are next biggies to add.  Performance right now is much better than it was in Images View. 

- Improvement: The singular LaunchBox.xml file has been replaced with separate XML files in the Data subfolder; this allows for better performance for external integrations like RocketLauncher and LEDBlinky

- Improvement: The LaunchBox rendering, data population, and caching engines have been revamped to vastly improve performance

 

I just wanted to say thank you to the devs for listening to us and addressing issues, as I've seen in other areas as well.  It's one of many reasons I went premium here.  Awesome community, as well!

Edited September 22, 2016 by Evil_Orko