Possible to speed up LaunchBox / BigBox load up times?

[DonkyKong]

Is it possible to make some changes or tweaks to something to speed up LaunchBox or BigBox load up times?

Now my collection has gotten rather large, It takes longer and longer to load, about 5mins now off my USB 3.0 HDD 

And yes before everyone Says put on SSD, this set up is portable, So I can play one any machine anywhere, Hence all on one large External HDD.

Thanks DK

Edited March 5, 2021 by DonkyKong

[zugswang]

Same here.

When you have a big collection, using Launchbox or Bigbox is a painful experience.

Speeding up the processes across both Launchbox and BigBox should be priority No1 IMO because it is almost unusable due to the way it processes everything in the background each time you try to do something.

[neil9000]

Speeding up things in both Launchbox and Bigbox is always a priority, insinuating it isnt a priority is uncalled for. Launchbox does require fairly beefy system specs, it is not a program designed to run on a toaster (not saying that is what you personally have). My Launchbox with around 14,000 games running from a mechanical 5400rpm HDD takes 15 seconds to load and i notice nothing happening in the background while editing and the like. On my SSD it loads in around 5 seconds and again i dont notice anything untoward's while in the program.

What are your system specs and what sort of drive is Launchbox on? Also what is your game count.

[Chris Kant]

23 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Speeding up things in both Launchbox and Bigbox is always a priority, insinuating it isnt a priority is uncalled for. Launchbox does require fairly beefy system specs, it is not a program designed to run on a toaster (not saying that is what you personally have). My Launchbox with around 14,000 games running from a mechanical 5400rpm HDD takes 15 seconds to load and i notice nothing happening in the background while editing and the like. On my SSD it loads in around 5 seconds and again i dont notice anything untoward's while in the program.

What are your system specs and what sort of drive is Launchbox on? Also what is your game count.

it depends on the amount of Systems and especially Playlists. the xml based solution in Launchbox cause slowdowns from the architecture perspective. also loading Artwork in Launchbox (open a system and presenting all games with 3d Artworks takes long).

I have the same experience with my 8700k overclocked, NVME SSD (with launchbox and artwork on it) and a RTX 2080. it is no longer a beefy system at all, I know.

[zugswang]

2 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Speeding up things in both Launchbox and Bigbox is always a priority, insinuating it isnt a priority is uncalled for. Launchbox does require fairly beefy system specs, it is not a program designed to run on a toaster (not saying that is what you personally have). My Launchbox with around 14,000 games running from a mechanical 5400rpm HDD takes 15 seconds to load and i notice nothing happening in the background while editing and the like. On my SSD it loads in around 5 seconds and again i dont notice anything untoward's while in the program.

What are your system specs and what sort of drive is Launchbox on? Also what is your game count.

Why would you take me saying it needs speeding up as priority no1 as uncalled for ?

I have had Launchbox for years and have not noticed any improvement in speed (again IMO)

Everything else is slick and games load quickly, but using the general interface of both Launchbox and BigBox is very slow for me IMO.

Launchbox continually adds new features practically on a daily basis and I was just stating that IMO speeding the entire thing up would be my no1 priority.

It loads ok with a handful of systems, but with 500+ systems (150,000 games) that I have and am sure 100's if not 1000's of others have you literally cannot do anything with it, without it taking 3-5 minutes to load BigBox for example, and jamming up when simply refreshing the media or trying to edit something in Launchbox for example

I have an I7 processor, 3.8ghz , 16gb ram Windows 10 64bit and running setup from a 16tb WD hard drive.

I was simply stating what I experienced and I thought moderators  would want to know this kind of information ?

I have the same amount of systems on another frontend and it loads instantly, so it takes a lot of getting used to waiting 3-5 minutes for BigBox to just load up.

 

Hopefully this forum won't go the same way as social media and not even allow people to air their views good or bad (on something I spent a lot of money on)

Please let me know if this is the case and I will stop pointing out my experiences (unless they are good ones obviously)

 

[neil9000]

9 minutes ago, zugswang said:

Hopefully this forum won't go the same way as social media and not even allow people to air their views good or bad (on something I spent a lot of money on)

At no point did i say you can not air your views, what i said was that insinuating that the speed of Launchbox was being ignored was lets be honest, a outright lie. It is constantly being optimized and getting speed increases. As i said my setup loads in 15 seconds from a mechanical drive, and i find that perfectly acceptable, but all setups will vary, and the more data you add to it, the longer its going to take, that's just a fact.

[zugswang]

1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

At no point did i say you can not air your views, what i said was that insinuating that the speed of Launchbox was being ignored was lets be honest, a outright lie. It is constantly being optimized and getting speed increases. As i said my setup loads in 15 seconds from a mechanical drive, and i find that perfectly acceptable, but all setups will vary, and the more data you add to it, the longer its going to take, that's just a fact.

Good to hear there is a fix for my speed issues

I will now look into deleted 136,000 games off my setup so I can load up quickly in 15 seconds (which would be very acceptable).

 

[Lordmonkus]

This has been brought up in the past and the thing is there is no magic switch that Jason can just flip and have LB/BB run butter smooth when it comes to dealing with large (or in your case, extremely large) libraries. If there was he would have done it long ago.

It's a known fact that LB/BB has higher system requirements than other frontends because of the way it is built but because of how it is built is what allows Jason to develop it and ad new features as quickly as he does while other front ends lag behind in their development of new features.

Like Neil said, Jason is always looking to improve performance and he does from time to time find little things that do help with it but it's not going to magically load or respond instantly with such large libraries with a simple piece of code.

[zugswang]

27 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

This has been brought up in the past and the thing is there is no magic switch that Jason can just flip and have LB/BB run butter smooth when it comes to dealing with large (or in your case, extremely large) libraries. If there was he would have done it long ago.

It's a known fact that LB/BB has higher system requirements than other frontends because of the way it is built but because of how it is built is what allows Jason to develop it and ad new features as quickly as he does while other front ends lag behind in their development of new features.

Like Neil said, Jason is always looking to improve performance and he does from time to time find little things that do help with it but it's not going to magically load or respond instantly with such large libraries with a simple piece of code.

It's great having all these new features, but for me they just slow my setup down even more.

The only way for me to use Launchbox is literally to cut 75% of it out so it can deal with it quicker.

I will look into doing this in the short term so I can get the best from it for now.

Thanks for info.

[Lordmonkus]

From what I understand new features don't really slow it down though, it's just a limitation of the tools and code Jason uses to develop LB.

Where I would start first with attempting to speed it up is remove any unnecessary media and use a theme that uses very little media. Personally I only use box art and gameplay screenshots and the Fundamental theme in BigBox. I also turn off all the eye candy effects like transition animations.

If that doesn't help then maybe you could have different Launchbox setups for different types of game sets. One for Arcade systems, a second for home consoles, a third for computer and so on.

[Chris Kant]

21 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

From what I understand new features don't really slow it down though, it's just a limitation of the tools and code Jason uses to develop LB.

Where I would start first with attempting to speed it up is remove any unnecessary media and use a theme that uses very little media. Personally I only use box art and gameplay screenshots and the Fundamental theme in BigBox. I also turn off all the eye candy effects like transition animations.

If that doesn't help then maybe you could have different Launchbox setups for different types of game sets. One for Arcade systems, a second for home consoles, a third for computer and so on.

I am not sure if this is a good long term way.

my problem is that I am losing more and more the positive vibes for this application because it is so exhausting to add artworks in a correct way to all the games and have a control on it plus the performance. I cannot wait for a new pole of potential enhancement and development focus for the next period. 

[Lordmonkus]

Well unless Jason decides to abandon all the current work and start over using some other programming method it's not going to change. You can either accept this or go find another frontend that suits your needs.

[zetec-s-joe]

Are we talking about the lag when skipping through wheels on Big Box or just the loading up times here?

[zugswang]

28 minutes ago, zetec-s-joe said:

Are we talking about the lag when skipping through wheels on Big Box or just the loading up times here?

Both

[zetec-s-joe]

Ok, I have the same problems on a Higher-End machine, you often drop to below 18fps when going fast through the wheels, no matter what your system is or total of games. It's been mentioned a lot here in the past

[Chris Kant]

On 3/30/2021 at 10:32 PM, Lordmonkus said:

Well unless Jason decides to abandon all the current work and start over using some other programming method it's not going to change. You can either accept this or go find another frontend that suits your needs.

I know what you want to say but it feels not like being open for critics. in Motorsport it is also good to be in the race and on the top but from one moment to another someone else is faster than you. never the less this discussion is far away for bringing us a step forward unless Jason is not part of this conversation.

[Jason Carr]

We're always working on improving performance. That said, yes, using a slow USB hard drive is not a recipe for a quick setup, and it will never be. If you need portability and better performance, use a file syncing tool like FreeFileSync (highly recommended), and sync over a network between SSDs. That will improve not only load times, but the performance of the entire experience.

There's no need to store large ROM files on an SSD (they can be stored anywhere really), but the media files really need to be on an SSD for the best performance.

The rest of the complaints I've addressed about 1,000 times over on the forums, so feel free to just search for my responses elsewhere. I've learned that answering the same stuff over and over again just gets in the way of progress.