(Solved) Big Box PAINFULLY slow!

[gogoplata]

PC Specs:
--  Intel Core i7-8700K 4.7GHz 6-Core (OC'd to 5.0GHz via ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-E BIOS.)
--  Team T-Force Night Hawk RGB LED 16GB DDR4 3200 RAM.
--  Crucial MX500 500GB M.2 Solid State Drive (Windows)
--  Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB Hard Drive (Launchbox)
--  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB FTW Edition Graphic Card (1860MHz OC'd to 2081MHz via MSI AfterBurner.)
--  Windows 10 Pro x64 Build 17134 (Optimized w/ effects, services & paging all disabled.)
--  Hyper-V Enabled.
--  No Firewall/Windows Firewall Disabled

Big Box:
--  All Transitions disabled and set to "None."
--  CoverFlow Image Quality set to "Medium."
--  Game Image Type set to "Clear Logos."
--  Image Cache set to "Force Populate."
--  All "Video" options disabled.
--  All "Sounds/Music" are disabled, except for the UI sounds.
--  Theme is "Futura Dark V." 
--  Disabled the "Fullscreen Optimizations" option in the BigBox.exe Properties. 

Launchbox:
--  Downloaded only "Banners," "Cart - Front," "Game Title," "Clear Logo," and "Gameplay" images.
--  Currently have 10,581 games loaded.
--  No videos or music.

 

Clearly, I have an extremely great setup and it's even optimized to run without any spiffy extra effects and such, and I even bareboned Big Box for the most part. Now, when I open Big Box, my custom video that I made plays, and then I sit here and wait for Big Box to load for about 10-12 minutes. After 10-12 minutes, it loads, and then if I try selecting an option in Big Box's menu, I have to wait about 4-5 minutes for it to register before I can do anything else. I'm at a total loss as to why it is running so absolutely poorly. I also have Big Box running on my Surface Pro 2... and it only takes 2 minutes to load and there's no issues. This boggles my mind. I've followed YouTube video instructions, as well as forum instructions about enhancing the speed of Big Box, and Google has been my friend, but the answers I've found on it, not so much! I'm so dumbfounded. Why am I having this issue?

 

 

[Jason Carr]

@gogoplata I'm guessing it somehow has to do with the data in your collection. If you can please zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder, I'll take a look to see if I can figure out what's causing it. I assume you're running LaunchBox 9.5?

[DOS76]

I've read in other post on the forums about MSI Afterburner interfering with LB/BB performance in the past.

[gogoplata]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

@gogoplata I'm guessing it somehow has to do with the data in your collection. If you can please zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder, I'll take a look to see if I can figure out what's causing it. I assume you're running LaunchBox 9.5?

Yes, I'm using 9.5. I'll send the zip over. Thanks.

[gogoplata]

1 hour ago, DOS76 said:

I've read in other post on the forums about MSI Afterburner interfering with LB/BB performance in the past.

I read that as well and attempted to disable as well as uninstall and it didn't do anything.

[DOS76]

Try opening an admin level command prompt and type sfc /scannow and look for any Windows corruption. Also you can try going to the update folder on your LB build and reinstalling your build over top of your old one just to see if there is any change in performance. It will be completely safe to do so without overwriting any of your previous LB data.

[gogoplata]

16 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

Try opening an admin level command prompt and type sfc /scannow and look for any Windows corruption. Also you can try going to the update folder on your LB build and reinstalling your build over top of your old one just to see if there is any change in performance. It will be completely safe to do so without overwriting any of your previous LB data.

I've tried checking my system for issues and I do very thorough cleans as well quite often. I haven't tried installing on top of it like you said though, which I think I'll attempt right now. Thanks.

[DOS76]

Okay I just suggested this as it can happen as you can see I just ran it myself and it found corruption and fixed it.

[Destroyernib]

im glad to have found this post I am also having the same problem and running 9.5 launchbox as well hopefully this helps 

[gogoplata]

7 hours ago, Destroyernib said:

im glad to have found this post I am also having the same problem and running 9.5 launchbox as well hopefully this helps 

Hopefully we can find an answer out of this.

9 hours ago, DOS76 said:

Okay I just suggested this as it can happen as you can see I just ran it myself and it found corruption and fixed it.

I ran it three days ago myself actually and all was fine. I usually run it monthly or when I randomly have issues with programs or games, just to check. But you're right, it needs to be done during issues on Windows or even regularly. Unfortunately though my scans found nothing.

[Jason Carr]

@gogoplata Unfortunately I've tested with your data and I'm not seeing any performance issues on my machines, so I'm guessing it's somehow system specific, or it's some kind of weird conflict with a running app. The next thing I would try is killing any and all processes that are running in the background via Task Manager, to see if there's a particular process that happens to be causing the issue. In the past, performance issues like this have often been the result of poorly written anti-virus software or similar.

[gogoplata]

3 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

@gogoplata Unfortunately I've tested with your data and I'm not seeing any performance issues on my machines, so I'm guessing it's somehow system specific, or it's some kind of weird conflict with a running app. The next thing I would try is killing any and all processes that are running in the background via Task Manager, to see if there's a particular process that happens to be causing the issue. In the past, performance issues like this have often been the result of poorly written anti-virus software or similar.

I appreciate you checking, Jason. I didn't think of that, but you may be right. I'm gonna disable all of my non-Windows services via MSConfig except Launchbox, then enable them one by one while opening Big Box, and see if I'll get any issues. That's if it even runs fast with all services disabled first, which I'd hope and expect it does. I guess it's more than likely a third-party software compatibility issue. Fingers crossed.

[gogoplata]

I got the answer! It's actually several programs. I've tried them each on and off when noticing an issue and then re-enabling others and came to the conclusion that Big Box hates EVGA Precision X, Asus Aura, and AI Suite III. These three programs each cause Big Box to go into a major delay for some odd reason! Funnily enough, I've also discovered that it was these programs that also caused Steam to load extremely slow (3-5 minutes), and it also causes major errors with most Stardock programs to theme and customize Windows (with the exception of Start10 & Groupy). Big Box now takes about 1 minute with everything enabled, from effects, to photos & videos, etc., and that is about a 10x-12x improvement in speed. THIS I can deal with. With everything on the previous Big Box settings I had in the original post, Big Box launched instantaneously with no delay. 

[Jason Carr]

33 minutes ago, gogoplata said:

I got the answer! It's actually several programs. I've tried them each on and off when noticing an issue and then re-enabling others and came to the conclusion that Big Box hates EVGA Precision X, Asus Aura, and AI Suite III. These three programs each cause Big Box to go into a major delay for some odd reason! Funnily enough, I've also discovered that it was these programs that also caused Steam to load extremely slow (3-5 minutes), and it also causes major errors with most Stardock programs to theme and customize Windows (with the exception of Start10 & Groupy). Big Box now takes about 1 minute with everything enabled, from effects, to photos & videos, etc., and that is about a 10x-12x improvement in speed. THIS I can deal with. With everything on the previous Big Box settings I had in the original post, Big Box launched instantaneously with no delay. 

Interesting. I run both Asus Aura and AI Suite III without issues (I always run Asus motherboards), so that's puzzling to me. But I'm glad you got it all squared away.

[jmargel]

I had the same exact issue.  i7 gt 1070, 16gb of ram.  Alienware R4.  Was running great then all of a sudden had these issues.  Tried numerous things until I manually checked for windows 10 updates.  Took 20 mins to download and install but after it was done, everything ran great.  No idea why it caused the slowdown.  Go under settings and check for windows updates.

[turbofeet]

I have the same problem and I think it's definitely windows related (possibly Direct X).

I say this because I also had the same issue loading the big box video, then launchbox (total 4-8 minutes) but I also had the same issue in Steam.

I used this command to fix Steam "steam://flushconfig" which does work (and also seems to help LB as well) but then the problem comes back after some time (perhaps even after a reboot).

Sometimes after a reboot it is fine for a while then starts freezing up (long delay) when launching games.

Launchbox takes about 15 seconds to load (after the startup video) which is normal.

I think Microsoft have truly screwed up Windows 10 in some recent updates. I installed Windows 10 Fresh today and I still have the same issue. 

My specs are:

Windows 10 64Bit
32GB RAM
ASUS Z270-A
i7 7700K
1TB 970Pro NAND SSD for Operating System
Samsung SSD for Emulated Game drive (G:)
Nvidia 1080ti

I think it should be able to handle Bubble Bobble.

My LB installation is completely portable and when I run it on another machine (work - lol) it works fine so it's definitely nothing to do with Launchbox.

My setup is a little different at home; in that my Launchbox and Emulators folders are local but I have a Symbolic Link to the Roms i.e.

mklink /d "g:\Emulators\Roms" "\\<MyServer>\Emulators\Roms"

I don't think that's the issue though. Windows defender is disabled.

Weirdly it seemed OK initially after the Windows 10 re-install but the delay came back as soon as I plugged in all of my USB devices.

I think it's a specific USB Device - most likely the controller or some other Human Interface Device. I have a lot of devices plugged in at home.

Microsoft must have recently screwed with X-Input as my Turtle Beach Wireless headset no longer has sound for Division 2 and Gears 5 Audio has been screwed from the start with any Wireless headset.

Before the re-install I removed GeForce Shadowplay which seemed to help but then (again) the delay came back.

I'm still analysing and I'll let you know if I find the solution.

[Jason Carr]

Thanks for the details @turbofeet; sorry you're running into those issues. Let us know if you figure anything out. Yes, it seems Windows 10 has been causing more issues than usual lately with the updates.

[turbofeet]

Yeah I was tempted to go back to windows 7 but support ends last year and I won't be able to play store games.

I will find out what the issue is.

Is there a logfile that can be populated in startup so I can see at which point it pauses?

[Jason Carr]

2 minutes ago, turbofeet said:

Yeah I was tempted to go back to windows 7 but support ends last year and I won't be able to play store games.

I will find out what the issue is.

Is there a logfile that can be populated in startup so I can see at which point it pauses?

There is an option to enable debug logging, yes. It may or may not get you any helpful info, though. The option is available in the Options window in LaunchBox, under Debugging.

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, turbofeet said:

Yeah I was tempted to go back to windows 7 but support ends last year and I won't be able to play store games.

I will find out what the issue is.

Is there a logfile that can be populated in startup so I can see at which point it pauses?

Tools/options/Debugging, check the box.