Games DB and Downloads Extremely Slow

[hegemon13]

I just downloaded Launchbox a couple days ago and purchased Premium. It's a great frontent, but populating it with art and videos will never happen at the speeds I'm seeing.

My download speeds in Launchbox are capping out at 1mbps, so each game takes up to 10 minutes. When I watch the connection in Task Manager, it occasionally pops up to 1.2 or 1.3, but immediately gets dropped back down to 900k or 1mb. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's behaving as if that particular connection were capped.

I am seeing similarly slow performance on the Games DB section of the website. It takes about 30 seconds just to return search results. If I click a game, the images on the page take several minutes to come in.

Finally, the app download also does the same thing. When I clicked the link from my email, it took several hours to download.

Before you point to my internet connection, I have Google Fiber with half-gigabit synchronous (500mbit up and down). Speedtests while this is happening show I am getting full speed on everything else. This only occurs on Launchbox, and it occurs across all connections to the domain.

Unfortunately, this makes the app useless to me. It does me no good if it's not feasible to populate the art, so I feel like I just wasted $70 on Launchbox and Emumovies. I certainly don't have time to go manually download stuff game by game. That's why I paid for this app!

Edited May 12, 2020 by hegemon13

[neil9000]

30 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

Before you point to my internet connection, I have Google Fiber with half-gigabit synchronous (500mbit up and down).

Then i would complain to them as to why they are limiting your connection. I only have a 60 down and 20 up, and that is maxed when scraping the database or downloading updates.

[hegemon13]

19 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Then i would complain to them as to why they are limiting your connection. I only have a 60 down and 20 up, and that is maxed when scraping the database or downloading updates.

Oh, for crying out loud. This has been an issue in these forums over and over again, and you always come in with the same answer.  Google Fiber does not throttle. I have never had this issue with any other site, period. I see the same poor performance on Launchbox-app.com from my mobile connection, too, which I tried to test whether it was some sort of dns issue. So, I've tried multiple high-speed providers and multiple devices.

I understand not everyone has this issue, and that you never do. You've made that clear to many people in this forum. I thoroughly searched it first, reading through all the many threads about this issue. I've disabled several potential problem apps others have pointed to (EVGA app, AlienFX). I stopped just about everything else in the taskbar.

I don't know what the issue is, but it IS an issue that has a cause somewhere. Continuing to blame people's internet connections only turns people against your service.

Again, it is a GREAT application, but I can't use it. I'm just hoping someone (clearly someone else, I guess) would have found the culprit for this issue by now. But given that the problem is on multiple connections and platforms, that suggests it's regional rather than a problem on the computer or a specific connection. Maybe there's a bad node in your distributed network, I don't now. Something is going on that is hitting certain people and not others, and I've yet to see a solution in the forums.

[hegemon13]

I ran a traceroute, and the issue is not at my connection end. It's timing out somewhere in the middle, beyond the reach of my particular ISP:

I'm in Kansas City. I thought I had read in the forum that launchbox had moved to a distributed system for the database. Is there not a closer node than Amsterdam to me?

[neil9000]

4 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

Oh, for crying out loud. This has been an issue in these forums over and over again, and you always come in with the same answer.

Says the new user????.

Our servers where moved a while ago, and are now seemingly great for everyone. There did indeed used to be issues, i was a victim of them, not being in the US where the servers where hosted, i had awful speeds for whatever i did. That was a while ago now, servers have been moved and upgraded, and everyone is happy, except for you it seems.

9 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

I don't know what the issue is, but it IS an issue that has a cause somewhere. Continuing to blame people's internet connections only turns people against your service.

Thats just not true.

10 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

Again, it is a GREAT application, but I can't use it. I'm just hoping someone (clearly someone else, I guess) would have found the culprit for this issue by now. But given that the problem is on multiple connections and platforms, that suggests it's regional rather than a problem on the computer or a specific connection. Maybe there's a bad node in your distributed network, I don't now. Something is going on that is hitting certain people and not others, and I've yet to see a solution in the forums.

@Jason Carr ill let you get into the exacts on the server, im out of this conversation with a clearly hostile user.

[hegemon13]

1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

Says the new user????.

Yes, a new user that has spent several hours trying to solve this before I posted for help, only to be told "go complain to your ISP." Making that assumption is a very poor response in a support forum. I am not hostile. I am very frustrated, having spent significant money and hours of time, only to be dismissed out of hand by the support moderator.

I may be new, but I read every thread in the forum I could find on this issue and tried the suggestions. There were complaints about this again as recently as December and March, so I wouldn't say the problem is solved for everyone.

I added the traceroute, which shows there's clearly a connection issue somewhere in the middle.

[neil9000]

11 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

Yes, a new user that has spent several hours trying to solve this before I posted for help, only to be told "go complain to your ISP." Making that assumption is a very poor response in a support forum. I am not hostile. I am very frustrated, having spent significant money and hours of time, only to be dismissed out of hand by the support moderator.

OK, you were not dismissed out of hand. That is overblowing the response somewhat.

 

31 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

Oh, for crying out loud. This has been an issue in these forums over and over again, and you always come in with the same answer.

That comment, specifically to my reply, says that you are specifically referring to me. It was a reply to my comment and says, "and you always come in with the same answer", "you" being me as you were replying to my post.

So yes i see that as hostility.

Regardless, im sure you will get a official response and not one from a moderator who does this in there spare time for free, and with no real knowledge of the source code, or intricacies of server deployment. 

 

[hegemon13]

I assumed you were an official response. I did not realize you were a volunteer user, and I apologize if I took your response as more dismissive as you intended.

Sorry to get off on a bad foot with you. I'm completely at a loss for what's causing this issue, and I really want to be able to get this working.

[Jason Carr]

It appears that there are some slower-than-normal speeds going on for some reason, yes. @C-Beats has also been experiencing slow speeds yesterday and today. Hopefully it's just because something went down somewhere in the Internet infrastructure and so things are taking an alternate route for some people. I've got full speeds, but apparently not everyone does.

But first off, sorry for the trouble.

1 hour ago, neil9000 said:

Then i would complain to them as to why they are limiting your connection. I only have a 60 down and 20 up, and that is maxed when scraping the database or downloading updates.

It is unfortunately not true that downloading things from the games database will always max out every connection from everyone in the world. Sadly, that's impossible. We don't control every node from the servers to everyone's PC.

38 minutes ago, hegemon13 said:

I'm in Kansas City. I thought I had read in the forum that launchbox had moved to a distributed system for the database. Is there not a closer node than Amsterdam to me?

We've never moved to a distributed system, no. We're just not that full of cash, unfortunately. Building a distributed system across the world is crazy expensive. Amsterdam is the *only* node.

In the past, we've been able to fix some speed issues by tracing routes and contacting our host. But it is an extensive process and requires running a bunch of tests on the destination network. However, I have a hunch that this is only a temporary issue. We can contact our host and pursue this further though if it doesn't resolve itself soon.

[hegemon13]

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a few days and try again. I don't expect it to max out a 500mbit connection. I just need it to be usable.

[C-Beats]

@hegemon13 I have been experiencing similar issues downloading from LaunchBox and other sites which seemed pretty random. I was able to correct it by contacting my ISP and having them do a reboot on the modem they give you. They have some data tables in there that cache routes and what not and it was causing it not to get a better route (me and the phone techs assumption, may not be entirely accurate). After doing so though my speeds returned to normal. Can't guarantee it will fix your issue as it did mine but worth a try. Was a very annoying problem to deal with...

[hegemon13]

I finally gave up on grabbing artwork through Launchbox. It was doing slightly better this morning, but still capping out at 4-5mbps. But this afternoon, back to <1mbit. A partial MAME import (about 1600 games) with only artwork (no videos) took over 24 hours to complete.

However, I found a workable solution. I import to Launchbox using metadata only, which runs very quickly. Then, I used Emumovies Sync to download artwork and videos. That tool runs at between 200 and 400 mbits, so it goesvery quickly. Then, I copied the Emumovies artwork into the Images and Videos folders.  A little more hands-on than I'd like, but it's workable.

Hopefully, the Launchbox speed issues will sort out, but this makes it usable and doesn't require too much extra effort. Once the speed issues resolve, I'll scan for missing media to get the manuals, box backs, and other stuff that Emumovies Sync doesn't grab.

And, man is BigBox a splendor. I've got it running on an Alienware Alpha mini PC, and it runs flawlessly smooth. I can truly do everything I need to using the arcade control panel. Can't wait till this quarantine is over to have some buddies over to show it off. 

[mark007]

Hi guys. I just moved in to a new house. It has 1gigabit connection and the likes of steam is downloading at well over 100MB per second. However launchbox download of media is very bugged in my opinion. I wanted to start with a clean slate so I deleted all of my images/video and importing images crawls up to perhaps 100 of 130,000 and barely moves even after 24 hours. I have tried various suggested options like unchecking the box to compare similar images.

Has anyone looked into the reason for this. I'm using emumovies lifetime package so I might try emu sync but as other posts say, we shouldn't have to. Has anyone figured out the reason for this?

[neil9000]

1 hour ago, mark007 said:

Has anyone looked into the reason for this. I'm using emumovies lifetime package so I might try emu sync but as other posts say, we shouldn't have to. Has anyone figured out the reason for this?

Yes we know the reasons for this, and if you had of searched these forums you would of found many posts on the same issue. It is due to the way the Emumovies API works, in that if we dont hit it for a piece of media within 15 minutes, all the URL's we got at the start of the process are deleted, so when we get to downloading media from them, the URL's have expired so you get a 404 error returned. They are working on there API in hopes of fixing this, but we can only use the tools we are are provided with, and it is how it is currently. There are some workarounds in the current beta if you are not running that that may help to alleviate the problems, also dont do your entire collection in one go, as that may mean hours to get to a specific system, by which time those URL's will no longer work, so go platform by platform.

[mark007]

Many thanks for the reply. I try those now. Thank you

[Colonel.Matrix]

Long time lurker here and recently purchased a license for LB/BB.

Loving it. I have to say after recently completing my initial setup with a full rom set it took THREE DAYS to complete my sync.. Felt like the old days of my 2400bps modem 😅

[yeonsha]

Please use IDM to increase your download speed x50 times more for downloading games-database

[dsync89]

Not sure if it is still relevant, but I've seen speed improvement from ~150kbps to 8MBps right after connecting to Amsterdam using ExpressVPN  Then again it's probably because the route to their Amsterdam node is not the optimized one reported by my ISP route.