First game loaded often takes 20+ seconds to start

[boohiss]

I've recently setup LaunchBox and Big Box, and am using Big Box with a gamepad.  When I select a game to play, often it will take around 20 seconds to start the game.  I am using retroarch for all of my systems if that matters.  After I exit that first game, I can select another game and it will load right up within a second or two.  This works if the roms are compressed or not (I've tested with NES uncompressed, and SNES compressed with the same result with both, both using retroarch).  

Is there something I can do to fix this?  It's very annoying and I have no idea what is going on.  Retroarch works fine in other frontends without this game loading lag.  

Edit:  It's not necessarily always the first game loaded.  Sometimes I can open Big Box and just load a game fine.  Other times, I wait a while as stated above.  Still no idea though what's going on :(.

Edited January 8, 2017 by boohiss

[SentaiBrad]

You're the first person I've really seen mention this, so I wonder if it's something very specific. Where are your games located? Are they on an external hard drive or a hard drive that has slower seek time? I wonder if your hard drive is taking it's time to boot up for access. It would make sense then that when you close RetroArch and load a new game that it doesn't need to essentially turn back on because it's already in "operation" mode. Sometimes if the first game starts right away you could have been accessing it or using something from it first.

[boohiss]

I didn't even think of that.  I'm going to set my HDD to never sleep and see if that solves things.  Games are on a HDD separate from Launchbox, so I'm thinking that's why.  I'll probably migrate launchbox itself to a SSD with the video and games on another HDD.