Launchbox using way too much ram.

[Fiend]

Launchbox always used to idle around 500MB/s which was fine, but after recent updates it's literally always over a gig, mainly at like 1,500MB/s. BigBox does not have this problem at all and it idles at 300MB/s but I like the convenience of LaunchBox not being a fullscreen application. I don't understand why the program seems so much more unoptimized than it used to be, but it's highly disappointing as I've been using the program for such a long time.

[Wally]

i guess it loads the data into RAM to be more quick which is a good thing. RAM is cheap nowdays.

I love Launchbox/BigBox but it gets less snappy, far more slow from version to version. Check version 8 against the latest version and you will see

[neil9000]

Agreed, 1.5GB really is a small amount of ram. I never understand comments when somebody says look at what INSERT PROGRAM NAME HERE uses for Ram or CPU usage, you should want programs to use all the resources they can access, thats the whole point of buying more powerful CPU's or buying more than 4GB of Ram, you want programs to use those resources. If you didnt want that, you would have 2GB of Ram and a 20 year old cheap CPU in your system still. A program using the resources available is a well designed program. I dont expect you complain when a game uses 100% of your GPU, why would any other components be any different?

[Fiend]

On 5/15/2021 at 6:55 AM, neil9000 said:

Agreed, 1.5GB really is a small amount of ram. I never understand comments when somebody says look at what INSERT PROGRAM NAME HERE uses for Ram or CPU usage, you should want programs to use all the resources they can access, thats the whole point of buying more powerful CPU's or buying more than 4GB of Ram, you want programs to use those resources. If you didnt want that, you would have 2GB of Ram and a 20 year old cheap CPU in your system still. A program using the resources available is a well designed program. I dont expect you complain when a game uses 100% of your GPU, why would any other components be any different?

So If I didn't want my program to use 15% of my ram, I would just downgrade to 2GB of ram so that it can use 75% of my ram, makes perfect sense. Upgrading your hardware isn't an excuse for a program to be unoptimized, especially when it was far better before. Like yeah I could get more ram but that doesn't make the program better, it would still just be using more ram than I want it to. Launchbox isn't a game, it's a program I use to launch games, so I would much prefer if it was using less resources and more optimized so that I could get the best performance out of the actual game I launched using it. And yes I would question a game that's using 100% of my GPU lmao, either I have the graphic settings way too high or the game is just unoptimized.

[C-Beats]

We do optimize LaunchBox but the primary focus of this optimization is speed and responsiveness of the application not memory usage. If we can limit memory usage without impacting speed of the application or it's responsiveness we of course do, but if either of those have to suffer we generally select to go the way of speediness/responsiveness (within reason).

Memory usage has gone up since previous versions because we have to cache more information than in previous versions. LaunchBox tends to also use more RAM because it caches more information in memory to help with importing and scraping speeds. It also can be set up to display more images at once time then most themes in Big Box which have to be loading to memory to display in the application.

RAM is by far the cheapest and most abundant resource a computer tends to have (save maybe hard drive space) and so optimizing strictly for less RAM usage would cause a lot of issues within the application and make the whole product EXTREMELY sluggish and increase the time it takes to do even the most mundane functions of the application by a pretty considerable amount. We have to make decisions constantly about whether to increase memory footprint OR increase performance, and when we have to decide between the two performance will win almost every time.

 

[neil9000]

24 minutes ago, Fiend said:

And yes I would question a game that's using 100% of my GPU lmao, either I have the graphic settings way too high or the game is just unoptimized.

lol, that statement is just completely incorrect, unless you manually limit a game, either by lowering resolution/graphics settings or limiting the framerate, a GPU should always be at 100%, if it isnt you have something wrong with your setup, or are simply not using the full potential of the GPU, and in that case, you may as well of just got a cheaper, slower GPU if you dont intend to use it for what it was designed for.

[Fiend]

20 hours ago, C-Beats said:

We do optimize LaunchBox but the primary focus of this optimization is speed and responsiveness of the application not memory usage. If we can limit memory usage without impacting speed of the application or it's responsiveness we of course do, but if either of those have to suffer we generally select to go the way of speediness/responsiveness (within reason).

Memory usage has gone up since previous versions because we have to cache more information than in previous versions. LaunchBox tends to also use more RAM because it caches more information in memory to help with importing and scraping speeds. It also can be set up to display more images at once time then most themes in Big Box which have to be loading to memory to display in the application.

RAM is by far the cheapest and most abundant resource a computer tends to have (save maybe hard drive space) and so optimizing strictly for less RAM usage would cause a lot of issues within the application and make the whole product EXTREMELY sluggish and increase the time it takes to do even the most mundane functions of the application by a pretty considerable amount. We have to make decisions constantly about whether to increase memory footprint OR increase performance, and when we have to decide between the two performance will win almost every time.

 

This was a very informative response, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this post.

 

20 hours ago, neil9000 said:

lol, that statement is just completely incorrect, unless you manually limit a game, either by lowering resolution/graphics settings or limiting the framerate, a GPU should always be at 100%, if it isnt you have something wrong with your setup, or are simply not using the full potential of the GPU, and in that case, you may as well of just got a cheaper, slower GPU if you dont intend to use it for what it was designed for.

I understand why you think you're right. But I have no interest in responding to you further, plus this argument has nothing to do with the original post topic.

[ilcomandantecobra]

Is there the possibility (and how beneficial it would eventually be in terms of resources usage) to implement a sort of "read only" running mode (no importing, no edit, nothing except looking at the db and launching the games) to lower the ram usage?

[RegularRegs]

I've seriously downsized my library, and it shaved a few hundred MB off the RAM, but It's still sitting around at least 1.2 GB. I do need to upgrade my system, but I wish there was something besides taking games down that helped it. I'm not even entirely sure that did anything to help. If anyone has a quick fix or something that helps, I'd appreciate it. Maybe removing all the excess images as well? My assumption on that is that if they aren't being called by Launchbox they can stay. Also, are there any skins that may use less features of the program, so it may use less RAM?

[C-Beats]

24 minutes ago, RegularRegs said:

I've seriously downsized my library, and it shaved a few hundred MB off the RAM, but It's still sitting around at least 1.2 GB. I do need to upgrade my system, but I wish there was something besides taking games down that helped it. I'm not even entirely sure that did anything to help. If anyone has a quick fix or something that helps, I'd appreciate it. Maybe removing all the excess images as well? My assumption on that is that if they aren't being called by Launchbox they can stay. Also, are there any skins that may use less features of the program, so it may use less RAM?

RAM usage (especially the usage displayed in Task Manager) isn't typically the greatest metric to use. Is there a reason you're caring about what that metric is? The OS will swap out what's in physical RAM as needed, even if we are sitting on that amount as displayed in Task Manager, some of that could be on disk (and will be should another process need it). If you're running out of physical memory you can look at increasing the page size on your boot drive. This is essentially part of your hard drive you're telling the OS it can use to shunt memory data into if it needs more space. Can help you in the interim. Typically Big Box uses less memory than LaunchBox since LaunchBox stores the local games DB definition in memory and I don't believe Big Box does. This is to make several actions in the app run quicker.