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Sluggish and slow frontend


Sande

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I've tested LaunchBox now with couple different fairly fast PCs and in both cases the UI was sluggish and slow to update when viewing your collection. Just checking whether it's a "feature", i.e. a slow implementation or if I have a wrong setting somewhere...? Is it smooth for anyone else?

 

Scrolling with images on is slow and choppy, scrolling further from the sidebar causes a slight delay after which images pop up again - same happens even in a text mode. It isn't completely unusable, just far slower and choppier than one would expect for this.

The media is loaded from a fast NVMe drive (~7000MB/s) so that shouldn't be the issue and everything else is running fast and smooth. There's roughly 3000 games with images in a collection.

Currently running this on Win10@Ryzen 9 3950X 16-Core, 32GB / RTX 2080Ti.

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What you may be experiencing is your image cache building. LaunchBox will take your displayed media and create a smaller version that is quicker to load the next time. If the cache hasn't been built yet though this process CAN add delay in loading items. Once the cache has been built this should speed up since we just read the smaller file from that point on. Swapping side bar values and reloading the grid can take a second and will cause that fade out/in though you are referring to.

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Thanks for the quick reply. That would make sense, although I have scrolled through the collection and all the covers (I'm guessing the cache gets built automatically in the background or when the image gets displayed?) and the Launchbox has also been open for quite some time - so I'd assume the cache is already in place?

I should also mention that the Big Box-side is smooth, no issues there - it's just the windowed Launchbox that is stuttering.

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Typically the cache job starts when you press a side bar filter option and load the grid. You'll see a real small progress bar toward the top of the UI (in Default) that is the cache build progress. It also gets cleared/rebuilt for ALL items anytime you change the image group or box size. If possible could you take a small vid of what you're experiencing and maybe I can see exactly what you are and let you know if that's "normal" or not.

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Ah. You have deferred scrolling on. What that means is that nothing will load in until you let go of the scroll bar. You can turn that off by going to Tools > Options. Navigate to Visuals > Main Window Theme > Features. Make sure the top box is CHECKED. This will update the grid immediately when scrolling and stop it from doing that.

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Ouch, that got my hopes up - but unfortunately no, that was already checked. Just to be thorough I tried unchecking it and then again with it checked, but it seems that wasn't the culprit.

There's so many options for customization and features (which is a good thing!), that I'm hoping this would be a case of just some toggle somewhere being wrong, but I haven't found anything yet...

EDIT> ...so I assume the behaviour/choppiness you see on the video when scrolling isn't normal, right?

Edited by Sande
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/22/2022 at 3:54 PM, C-Beats said:

That behavior you're seeing is almost certainly deferred scrolling happening. Are you running a theme? Another thing you could try is to uncheck "Dynamic Box Sizing" in options and see if that helps you.

Sorry for the long delay.

I agree, it looks a lot like it - but there is a clear difference if I uncheck it and then try (the delay feels worse and the games appear in one big clump, instead of in a rapid succession, as expected.)

Front End seems to be using the Default theme, the collection I have installed is Dreams 64, if that makes a difference. I noticed the Box images were fairly large (taking 1.7GB on disk) so I batch converted those first to smaller PNGs, but that didn't help. Then I converted those to really small JPEGs without transparency, but even that didn't help - the performance was pretty much identical to original images. I've also tried with using just a plain black backdrop (with those small jpegs), using desktop wallpaper etc - none of those made a difference. Same with Dynamic Box sizing, I didn't notice any difference. I also made sure debug logs are off (didn't notice any perf impact with those.)

 

One thing that does make difference is lowering the amount (3011) of games - with only 128 games in one of the playlists, the scrolling is almost smooth (still not 100%, but better.)

For what it's worth, if I navigate to that folder in Windows, the file explorer can smoothly scroll through all of those images regardless of their size without any hitches. 

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The version seems to be 12.1.

I've also tried running this as Admin, different compatibility modes (Win10 with latest patches and nVidia's drivers the actual OS), different View settings (e.g. side bars on/off etc), but so far nothing has helped.

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17 hours ago, Sande said:

The version seems to be 12.1.

I've also tried running this as Admin, different compatibility modes (Win10 with latest patches and nVidia's drivers the actual OS), different View settings (e.g. side bars on/off etc), but so far nothing has helped.

I can concur that some really good UI improvements have been done with caching and dashboard media loading in (I believe) 12.12 and further improvements in 12.14, so 12.15 may help you with the performance.

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  • 2 months later...

Unfortunately, I am having this exact same problem.  I am on 13.1-beta-2.  The irony of this is I was watching the developer fix this in a live stream from 2016 today.  He was going on about Windows Forms vs WPF  and caching. I was like... my LaunchBox build never ran that smoothly, and I have been using this software since 2017.  It drives me crazy, but I have learned to live with it.

I have also tried the recommended remedies mentioned earlier in the thread, and nothing improved the performance.

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  • 9 months later...

Hi, I have a slightly different issue. Recently did a fresh install of both w11 and LB, so I'm on Lb's late version. And now it takes a long time (like 2-3 secs) to load the game's art each time you click on every other game. 

Actually, I just added a dozen games from a couple platforms, so it shouldn't be a cache issue...

Running on a ryzen 5600 with 16gb ram on a nvme.

Edited by davken
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