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LaunchBox and BigBox Suddenly MUCH Slower


NinjaBurg3r

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I'll preface this by saying I have a somewhat large library at 21,565 games that is all on an entirely self-contained portable installation on a 10TB external HDD. Once I finally got everything setup the way I liked it, this setup ran beautifully, both LaunchBox and BigBox, with silky smooth animations and snappy menus.  After a hiatus of a few months, I've come back to find that this is no longer the case. While LaunchBox and BigBox load quickly, all of the animations are EXTREMELY sluggish and choppy. Scrolling through a list of games for a system is no longer smooth and responsive. Worse yet is that BigBox is even slower. I am using the default theme and all of the system/platform stylized background videos play very poorly, as in single frames per second. Scrolling through the BigBox system and games menus is very slow and chunky with long load periods.  Interestingly, once inside the system category and in the game lists, all of the game preview videos play smoothly, however, it is the animations here (such as the text coming into the screen, ratings and whatnot) that are very slow and choppy.

I've gone in and checked random videos within Windows and all play just fine.  All of my ROMs play fine and RetroArch runs without any issue. I've defragmented, ran "sfc /scannow", installed a new copy of LaunchBox over my existing copy, Installed a copy elsewhere on the drive along with copying the data folder from my old install, and am currently running the extensive version of the media cleanup tool.

I can't stress enough how smoothly this portable setup used to run on my PC which is why it is so shocking how poorly it is currently running.

The PC is an i7 7700K, 32GB 3200Mhz RAM, 2080Ti with Windows installed on an NVMe drive.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated because I would love to get to the bottom of this and get back to enjoying the heck out of my LB/BB retro setup!

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This unfortunately is Launchbox/Bigbox biggest issue, it's very slow (2 minutes to load up Bigbox, 30 seconds to load up Launchbox) for me.

I thought it was because I had 150,000 games on my setup, but it's slow due to the way Launchbox/Bigbox is working in the background.

It has to do too many backups etc and feels like it is looking at the entire setup each time you try to do anything.

I also have Hyperspin, and even with 150,000 games on that everything is practically instant when doing anything. (Obviously working in a different way, but using same emulators/media/roms)

Hopefully speed can be improved over time, because as beautiful as it looks, this is a fatal flaw for sure.

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The most common reasons for visible slow downs are either there is image caching occurring or video drivers aren't updated properly. In large libraries auto-generated playlists tend to cause a pretty large increase in start up times as well. If the auto-gen playlist is pretty much "complete" you can speed up the startup by unchecking the auto generate check box and reverting it to a manual list.

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40 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

you can speed up the startup by unchecking the auto generate check box and reverting it to a manual list.

Is there a 'general' option (checkbox) to do this (a sort of 'bulk' checkbox) or is it needing to be done per Playlist?image.thumb.png.8c2f2a74d8cba3ac10f700ba47c44d27.pngOr this this even what you were referring to? :$   

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1 hour ago, C-Beats said:

The most common reasons for visible slow downs are either there is image caching occurring or video drivers aren't updated properly. In large libraries auto-generated playlists tend to cause a pretty large increase in start up times as well. If the auto-gen playlist is pretty much "complete" you can speed up the startup by unchecking the auto generate check box and reverting it to a manual list.

Startup times aren't bad for either LB or BB. They both startup rather quickly, it's just the jerky/choppy scrolling/animations/video that are the bother.  I went ahead and took a look at my playlists (don't ever use them, only sort through platform) and there were a bunch of auto-generated ones.  Went ahead and removed all of them to test and the performance is still the same. No caching currently going on either.  I went to the "All" category in LB, and ran a keyboard macro to slowly go through the list giving each box time to load. Even after they are fully populated performance is still very bad and scrolling is not smooth at all.  I also went into BB and ran the options to force populate all game wheel images and all coverflow images with no improvement either unfortunately.

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What video playback engine are you using? VLC is recommended. Though that would only really affect video playback and have no real affect on the menu navigation responsiveness. When's the last time you've updated your video drivers? Also if you anything running/using a service called "Nahimic" (used by a lot of audio driver tools) that is known to cause some of the issues you are seeing as well.

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VLC, although I've tried both to equal results. I have an interesting wrinkle to add after doing a little more troubleshooting.  I unhooked the 10TB external drive from my desktop and hooked it up to a laptop, and BigBox video stuttering is completely gone.  This is odd as the desktop is much more powerful than the laptop. I've tried several different USB ports now on the desktop all with the same result which makes me think there is a setting or program unique and new to this desktop that is causing all the fuss. 

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2 hours ago, NagakiriHidechi said:

I think I ran into a similar problem. I just updated to 11.9 beta 1. and suddenly it takes roughly 2 minutes as opposed to 5 seconds to start up. Is there something I could have  done wrong? Is it easy enough to downgrade LaunchBox?.

Could be a beta issue. Users in the new beta thread mentioned this. 

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2 hours ago, NagakiriHidechi said:

Is there something I could have  done wrong? Is it easy enough to downgrade LaunchBox?.

To be perfectly honest you should expect things like this to happen, this is why the releases are labelled as betas, you are testing new features ahead of release. On rare occasions a beta could completely break your setup. If you dont want to actually help to test new features then please turn betas off.

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