BigBox is excruciatingly slow.

[thedevilsjester]

When scrolling through the list of games, BigBox will often just stop scrolling and then sit there for a few seconds until it eventually loads the box art for the currently selected title.  Sometimes it stops for half a second, so its just stutter, and sometimes its 5+ seconds.  There is currently a thread on this forum that discusses this (as well as someone posting a video that has the same behavior that I am experiencing), but its been locked.

I have an Intel i7 7567U with a Intel Iris Plus 650 and 16 GB RAM, running off of an SSD in Windows 10.  No other applications or services are running.  I am using the default theme.

I really like BigBox and I think the configuration design in LaunchBox is unmatched, but its unusable in its current state.  What can I do to fix this that doesn't include disabling most of BigBox's features?

Edited April 11, 2018 by thedevilsjester

[Jason Carr]

17 minutes ago, thedevilsjester said:

When scrolling through the list of games, BigBox will often just stop scrolling and then sit there for a few seconds until it eventually loads the box art for the currently selected title.  Sometimes it stops for half a second, so its just stutter, and sometimes its 5+ seconds.  There is currently a thread on this forum that discusses this (as well as someone posting a video that has the same behavior that I am experiencing), but its been locked.

I have an Intel i7 7567U with a Intel Iris Plus 650 and 16 GB RAM, running off of an SSD in Windows 10.  No other applications or services are running.  I am using the default theme.

I really like BigBox and I think the configuration design in LaunchBox is unmatched, but its unusable in its current state.  What can I do to fix this that doesn't include disabling most of BigBox's features?

Most likely image caching is happening in the background. Try going to Options > Image Cache and running the two Force Populate items. Though to be honest that does not sound like a typical experience for that hardware, though Intel graphics could be a severe bottleneck, but I wouldn't expect that to cause stuttering like that.

What version of Big Box are you running?

[Jason Carr]

Also take note that since it's a laptop, it could be doing some awful things with reducing performance to save battery life. Every laptop is different, but that is a common issue.

[neil9000]

11 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Also take note that since it's a laptop, it could be doing some awful things with reducing performance to save battery life. Every laptop is different, but that is a common issue.

Agreed, do you get the same performance plugged in Vs battery?

[DOS76]

Try changing your power setting also as Windows (10 at least) by default is put into a balanced state and not performance.

[thedevilsjester]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Also take note that since it's a laptop, it could be doing some awful things with reducing performance to save battery life. Every laptop is different, but that is a common issue.

Its not a laptop, its a mini-pc, it has no battery, its always plugged in.

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

though Intel graphics could be a severe bottleneck, but I wouldn't expect that to cause stuttering like that.

What version of Big Box are you running?

This is one of, if not the highest performing integrated intel graphics chip, its no slouch. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+Iris+Plus+650

Not that there is a direct comparison, but I can run PCSX2 at 2x Native Resolution at  an unlocked 120+ FPS on demanding games like God of War, without any issue.

I am not on my emulation box right now to check the version, but I downloaded it from the download link emailed to me about 4 days ago, so its pretty recent.

Edited April 11, 2018 by thedevilsjester

[DOS76]

I would still checkout adjusting the power settings unless you have already changed them yourself to high performance

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, thedevilsjester said:

Its not a laptop, its a mini-pc, it has no battery, its always plugged in.

This is the highest performing integrated intel graphics chip, its no slouch. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+Iris+Plus+650

Agreed, its no slouch, its also not a powerhouse either, intergrated intel graphics can raise small form factor PC's above what they can by default, but its just that a small PC with a integrated gpu. Don't get me wrong I have a fondness for them myself,  but intel gpu's are not great.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

Agreed, its no slouch, its also not a powerhouse either, intergrated intel graphics can raise small form factor PC's above what they can by default, but its just that a small PC with a integrated gpu. Don't get me wrong I have a fondness for them myself,  but intel gpu's are not great.

That said, the GPU should not be causing 5 second stutters. That lends itself to a storage issue; it is a known fact that slow storage can cause performance issues. I would first try force populating the cache as described above. If that doesn't fix it, let us know the make and model of your SSD @thedevilsjester.

[thedevilsjester]

16 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

If that doesn't fix it, let us know the make and model of your SSD @thedevilsjester.

I don't see how this could be causing the issue, resource loading should be asynchronous, the menu navigation should not block waiting on these resources.   Should I file this as a bug?

I haven't checked any settings yet (I won't be able to for hours) but the SSD is: Corsair Force Series MP500 M.2 NVMe PCIe. 

 

[Jason Carr]

2 minutes ago, thedevilsjester said:

I don't see how this could be causing the issue, resource loading should be asynchronous, the menu navigation should not block waiting on these resources.   Should I file this as a bug?

I haven't checked any settings yet (I won't be able to for hours) but the SSD is: Corsair Force Series MP500 M.2 NVMe PCIe. 

 

There's obviously something fishy going on, yes. Though no reason to file it as a bug as we can help you troubleshoot it here. Please try all that we've suggested above and let us know. No reason to continue discussing it until the above suggestions have been exhausted.

[Jason Carr]

For what it's worth, resource loading *is* asynchronous. Big Box is extremely well threaded and favors multiple cores as much as possible.

[thedevilsjester]

50 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

For what it's worth, resource loading *is* asynchronous. Big Box is extremely well threaded and favors multiple cores as much as possible.

I did not mean to imply that it wasn't, I assumed it was (as its the only sane way to do things) I meant that it might be a bug that in this system.  I will try these options and report back once I have some results.

[thedevilsjester]

I am more confused than ever now.

BigBox downloads the images and stores them locally when I add games to my collection.  This I expect.

BigBox caches the images by copying them from one spot on the hard drive...to another spot on the hard drive?  This I did not expect.

At least it appears to be doing this.  As BigBox is running doing the "Force Cache", its filling up the last 5-10 GB of my hard drive and then crashes because it cannot write anymore to the hard drive.  I free up another 4-5 GB and it resumes the "Force Cache" and just fills that up and crashes again.  The only thing I can think is that its copying the existing images, the ones it already has, to some other location. 

Needless to say, there was no way that I could complete a "Force Cache" and see if it works faster because I don't have an additional 20 GB of free space.

[Jason Carr]

53 minutes ago, thedevilsjester said:

I am more confused than ever now.

BigBox downloads the images and stores them locally when I add games to my collection.  This I expect.

BigBox caches the images by copying them from one spot on the hard drive...to another spot on the hard drive?  This I did not expect.

At least it appears to be doing this.  As BigBox is running doing the "Force Cache", its filling up the last 5-10 GB of my hard drive and then crashes because it cannot write anymore to the hard drive.  I free up another 4-5 GB and it resumes the "Force Cache" and just fills that up and crashes again.  The only thing I can think is that its copying the existing images, the ones it already has, to some other location. 

Needless to say, there was no way that I could complete a "Force Cache" and see if it works faster because I don't have an additional 20 GB of free space.

I see. Now it's starting to make more sense. Yes, Big Box uses a very large image cache in order to improve performance, largely because the original source images are often huge and can cause performance problems, so the cache is used. It may be that the disk space issue was cause for the performance problems to begin with.

The only thing I can suggest is removing any image types that you won't be using to free up space for the cache. By default LaunchBox downloads tons and tons of images, so chances are there are a bunch that you don't need that you can just go and delete from LaunchBox\Images\[Platform]\[Image Type].

[thedevilsjester]

14 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

I see. Now it's starting to make more sense. Yes, Big Box uses a very large image cache in order to improve performance, largely because the original source images are often huge and can cause performance problems, so the cache is used. It may be that the disk space issue was cause for the performance problems to begin with.

The only thing I can suggest is removing any image types that you won't be using to free up space for the cache. By default LaunchBox downloads tons and tons of images, so chances are there are a bunch that you don't need that you can just go and delete from LaunchBox\Images\[Platform]\[Image Type].

Can I delete the original images after they are cached?  I did not allocate space on this partition for double resources.  Even if I manage to delete enough image types that it can successfully cache the existing images, I planned this partition with a little more wiggle room than it has now with the cache.

There should really be a little "loading" icon in the corner of the screen that indicates that its still background caching.  It took 5-10 minutes to "Force Cache" on a pretty fast SSD.  I cannot imagine how long it would take to fully cache everything when its just doing it in the background on a regular HDD.  A little spinning icon would at least say: "Hey, we are doing something"

Edited April 12, 2018 by thedevilsjester

[Jason Carr]

43 minutes ago, thedevilsjester said:

Can I delete the original images after they are cached?  I did not allocate space on this partition for double resources.  Even if I manage to delete enough image types that it can successfully cache the existing images, I planned this partition with a little more wiggle room than it has now with the cache.

There should really be a little "loading" icon in the corner of the screen that indicates that its still background caching.  It took 5-10 minutes to "Force Cache" on a pretty fast SSD.  I cannot imagine how long it would take to fully cache everything when its just doing it in the background on a regular HDD.  A little spinning icon would at least say: "Hey, we are doing something"

No, you can't really delete the original images, unfortunately. You can, but if the cache is ever refreshed you'll lose the images. Yes, agreed, we could definitely use something to note that caching is going on in the background.