LaunchBox + unRAID server = some weird behavior when starting LB (including 1 minute and longer loading times).

[Z3R0B4NG]

I noticed some weird behavior the last few days...  

LaunchBox was sometimes starting very slowly, especially while i was rebuilding PS1 and PS2 romsets in CLRMamepro that sit on my unRAID server (meaning lots of LAN traffic and some negligible cpu load)

I think i have the slow starting behavior nailed down to LAN traffic.

My ROM collection mostly sits on my unRAID server, everything CD based anyway.
 

- TEST CASE 1: unRAID Server is ON, HDDs are spun down.

result: LaunchBox takes roughly one MINUTE to open.
LAN traffic detected:

(red is download, green is upload, yellow is both up+download at the same time).

LaunchBox will NOT start unless this LAN traffic has completed. which explains why it took multiple minutes while i was rebuilding PS1/PS2 sets the other day.

 

- TEST CASE 2:  

unRAID Server shut OFF

LaunchBox takes about 15 seconds to start (not bad for >30k imported "games")
NO LAN traffic detected.

- TEST CASE 3:

unRAID Server freshly booted up again, HDDs are spinning

LaunchBox needed roughly 2 minutes to launch and i could see some read operations on the HDDs the entire time, not 100% sure those were from LaunchBox or from LaunchBox alone, on a freshly booted system there are always some KB/s reads and writes and it takes a few minutes to settle down i'm not 100% sure if i waited long enough for it to settle down.  
But note the different shape of the LAN traffic, clearly indicating that it reads off disk.  

 

- TEST CASE 4:

unRAID Server ON, HDDs spun down

The "shape" of the LAN traffic is identical to Test 1 again.
The HDDs are supposed to spin up on their own when accessed, that takes maybe 15 to 30 seconds, they did not spin up at all.

 

 

- TEST CASE 5:

HDDs are spinning again  

now the shape of the traffic is identical to before with spun down drives and NO read or writes to the disks is observed.  

My assumption is that it simply reads whatever it reads from the Servers RAM now as it should be cached after the first time anyway and that is probably true for previous tests as well.  

...  

 

CONCLUSION:

i will assume that LaunchBox will act the same way for anybody with any type of NAS and that this is not unRAID specific behavior (maybe apart from how it caches data in RAM).  

Ultimately, LaunchBox can start in 15 seconds for me when the Server is OFF, there is no reason it should not be able to be this fast when the Server is ON.  
...maybe the startup routine from LaunchBox can be optimized to avoid this LAN traffic stuff.  

Or maybe something completely else is happening here,
maybe there is a button in the options menu i can press to make it stop doing this LAN traffic so it starts in 15 seconds every time?  

Either way, i can now stop wondering why it took 5 to 10 minutes to start LaunchBox while i was rebuilding PS1/PS2 rom sets with CLRMamepro on the Server the other day (literally to the point where i had forgotten i clicked on LaunchBox and was already half way through some youtube video when LaunchBox suddenly popped up).  

 

Specs (for context) :
i7-7700K @ 4.8GHz, 16GB DDR4, 1GBit LAN, Win10 recently updated to 1909, >33k "game icons" in LaunchBox v10.11,
unRAID server: i7-3770, 16GB DDR3, 1GBit LAN

 

Edited March 15, 2020 by Z3R0B4NG