Lag in COLORFUL BigBox Theme

[SiriusVI]

17 hours ago, faeran said:

Hey @SiriusVI. Seems like you've done quite a lot to try and solve your colorful theme conundrum.

Here's my 2c on how you can try and troubleshoot further. This probably works best if you can create a copy of your existing LaunchBox folder.

• First, you'll want to remove any LaunchBox plugins, just remove that variable altogether (all files within the LAUNCHBOX\Plugins folder).
• Test and see if that helps any (don't think it will but it's good to check).
• Then, start removing playlists from LaunchBox, one by one, and then platforms, testing in-between until you get to a point where the theme is finally functioning properly.

This will, at the very least, give you some more info you can work with.

Just know that the colorful theme was built using a special themer plugin, which is used to accomplish certain theming functionality. It could potentially be this plugin that's conflicting with either other plugins that you may have used (or are using) to build your particular library. I'm just not entirely sure how.

Good luck. Hope this, at the very least, gives you some more insight as to your issue.

Tanks for jumping in,

unfortunately I tried your plugin suggestion already and it didn't fix the problem. I will try removing stuff and see if that helps.

7 hours ago, sevenalive said:

I unfortunately am out of ideas too.

I would recommend that you try to clean up those platforms and categories b/c I spotted a few duplicates and redundancies, nothing major. For example there's a "Games" platform that has 2-3 games in it.

You certainly do have one of the most biggest setup's I've seen and BigBox on my machine definitely handled it from what I could tell.

Thank you for your continued support. Bummer that we couldn't figure out a solution. The "Games" Platform is from C64 Dreams, As far as I can see there are more than 2 or 3 games in it, though. It should contain 2500 games, in fact.

Edited June 3, 2021 by SiriusVI

[SiriusVI]

On 6/3/2021 at 4:06 AM, sevenalive said:

I unfortunately am out of ideas too.

I would recommend that you try to clean up those platforms and categories b/c I spotted a few duplicates and redundancies, nothing major. For example there's a "Games" platform that has 2-3 games in it.

You certainly do have one of the most biggest setup's I've seen and BigBox on my machine definitely handled it from what I could tell.

 

On 6/2/2021 at 6:26 PM, faeran said:

Hey @SiriusVI. Seems like you've done quite a lot to try and solve your colorful theme conundrum.

Here's my 2c on how you can try and troubleshoot further. This probably works best if you can create a copy of your existing LaunchBox folder.

• First, you'll want to remove any LaunchBox plugins, just remove that variable altogether (all files within the LAUNCHBOX\Plugins folder).
• Test and see if that helps any (don't think it will but it's good to check).
• Then, start removing playlists from LaunchBox, one by one, and then platforms, testing in-between until you get to a point where the theme is finally functioning properly.

This will, at the very least, give you some more info you can work with.

Just know that the colorful theme was built using a special themer plugin, which is used to accomplish certain theming functionality. It could potentially be this plugin that's conflicting with either other plugins that you may have used (or are using) to build your particular library. I'm just not entirely sure how.

Good luck. Hope this, at the very least, gives you some more insight as to your issue.

Something else I noticed. While CPU and GPU load are pretty normal when using BigBox, BigBox does use over 20GB of Ram. Ram use is continuously climbing . Is that normal?

 

 

After a certain amount of time, it seems that ram use dips down again:

Edited June 5, 2021 by SiriusVI

[SiriusVI]

6 hours ago, sevenalive said:

I did notice that RAM was climbing with your data on my system, it does seems like there could be a memory leak somewhere.  On my system with your dataset, I was pushing 4GB of ram it was eating more. I think it stabilized for me, but I honestly didn't look at the ram usage closely enough to see if it for sure did. Did you run "Force fill platform/game image wheel caches"? I wonder if it's building a cache that is eating that ram in the background.

My data causes 938MB of ram for the 8500 games, it's holding steady. Then I scrolled and changed platforms and it climbed to 1327MB then fell to 1200Mb after even more scrolling. After being Idle for a while it's at 910MB now.

BigBox must be pre-loading-caching stuff as it runs, so images and video are super quick and responsive. The sheer number of items that you have would require lots of ram. @Jason Carr can better provide an explanation of what Big Box does in the background.

One other difference is I don't have any playlists and I think you had tons, try removing the playlist folder and the cache files and see if that does anything. Maybe BigBox preloads playlists or not, IDK.

 

For each test, monitor ram and evaluate UI performance,

Test 1: Rename the Data\Playlists folder to Playlists.bak or something then launch big box

Test 2: Rename your Images folder

Test 3: Rename both images and video

The idea here is to see if media play a part in the RAM and to see if playlists affect RAM or UI performance

So I've deleted the ListCache.xml in the Data folder, which seems to have sped up my setup a little. It's still laggy, but much less than before.

Removing all Playlists smoothed out the setup to a point where I'd consider the performance smooth enough. But the benefits of using playlists outweighs the benefits of using Colorful, no matter how beautiful the theme is. 

Besides, my setup ran smoothly on your machine, so the problem must be somewhere else.

I'll try renaming the image directories later, but I doubt that's the problem, because I didn't use any images in my Launchbox Testsetup on my other SSD.

EDIT:

Scratch that, after a few reboots of BigBox, the lag returns, I guess after Listcache finished it's processes.

Earlier today, I also opened up my PC and dd a little RAm readjustment. I was using 4 Ram Sticks (2x Corsair + 2 x G.Skill). I know that you shouldn't mix brands, but I was careful that all the values are compatible. In fact I never had problems using these 2 together. I removed the G.Skill anyway to try if that solved my problem. It didn't. Now I'm running 32GB of Ram instead of the former 48 GB of ram.
I'm wondering if I should put the G.Skill back in or if I shuuld leave them out, just in case there were issues which I just wasn't aware of. I don't know, yet.

Anyway, long story short, my issue still isn't fixed.

Edited June 5, 2021 by SiriusVI

[SiriusVI]

Has anything changed in the latest Beta? I took a break from curating my Launchbox Setup and when I switched it on today and tried the colorful theme again, everything worked much more smoothly. Apart from small lags, everything is snappy now. That's great.