Why is Launchbox so slow?

[Merovingio]

I will never understand it. I don't understand why developers don't focus on the speed of Launchbox. I'm talking about the immediacy of when you click on a game the video plays instantly. And Launchbox takes between 3 and 5 seconds to show a video of a game, an excessively long time that ends up breaking the experience. With each update it gets worse. We are facing LB's great handicap, his Achilles heel. For me it is quite serious and if it were not for other features, which are fantastic and exclusive to LB, I would move on to another gaming frontend.

[Jabb3rJaw]

24 minutes ago, Merovingio said:

I will never understand it. I don't understand why developers don't focus on the speed of Launchbox. I'm talking about the immediacy of when you click on a game the video plays instantly. And Launchbox takes between 3 and 5 seconds to show a video of a game, an excessively long time that ends up breaking the experience. With each update it gets worse. We are facing LB's great handicap, his Achilles heel. For me it is quite serious and if it were not for other features, which are fantastic and exclusive to LB, I would move on to another gaming frontend.

For me it has improved over the updates! It was so bad I couldn’t even use it in my cab but now I have it in place of Hyperspin. It still could be faster as sometime the wheels won’t load for a split second in Bigbox but still way better than before. So for me I agree could still be faster but good enough now that I left my other front end. Could it be your pc? I think there’s a thread on here about getting the best performance from Launchbox. Good luck! 

Edited October 14, 2023 by Jabb3rJaw

[Merovingio]

Just now, Jabb3rJaw said:

For me it has improved over the updates! It was so bad I couldn’t even use it in my cab but now I have it in place of Hyperspin. It still could be faster as sometime the wheels won’t load for a split second in Bigbox but still way better than before. So for me I agree could still be faster but could enough now that I left my other front end. Could it be your pc? I think there’s a thread on here about getting the best performance from Launchbox. Good luck! 

I have an NVidia RTX 3080 and Intel Core i9-13900K 3 GHz Box processor + 32 GB RAM. There's no way it could be a problem with my PC.

[Retro808]

Looking at the video this looks like the delays caused by the theme's fades/animations when loading the next metadata. I use a custom theme I made without all those affects and the next meta and video loads well within a second. When I switch to the Default theme or another with those kind of animations it usually take 2-4 seconds for the next load. It is definitely not excessively long, but then again I compare it to trying to get media to load on the Nintendo Switch when in the eShop. 😃 So my opinion differs. 

My recommendation is try a couple other themes and see if the delays differ. I would also recommend closing down all other applications running just to ensure something 3rd party is not affecting this. Provide us any feedback once you have done that. 

[daguerou]

I'm with you when you say that today developers don't mind performance. I see it everyday in my job. For me one of the selling point (because it's not free) is to be able to have a nice user experience when you are trying to find a game. But it's not, you have to pay for it and I was thinking it would be better than others like recalbox and sadly it's not. Same for me I have the last asus rog flow and the performance is not acceptable. I don't know wich "technology" is used to build this software (I think it's .NET) but developers definitely don't have a good mindset when building it. A software like this one should be built almost from scratch without dependencies and focus on performance, portability (because portability without performance is useless) and bug free as possible.
30 bucks for a feature I can't use is not acceptable, and should be removed in my opinion, because it worsen launchbox's reputation.
Having 2s to 5s between each key press is terrible, who can find it acceptable at this point ? It's just a GUI.
 

Edited October 20, 2023 by daguerou

[Jabb3rJaw]

19 hours ago, daguerou said:

I'm with you when you say that today developers don't mind performance. I see it everyday in my job. For me one of the selling point (because it's not free) is to be able to have a nice user experience when you are trying to find a game. But it's not, you have to pay for it and I was thinking it would be better than others like recalbox and sadly it's not. Same for me I have the last asus rog flow and the performance is not acceptable. I don't know wich "technology" is used to build this software (I think it's .NET) but developers definitely don't have a good mindset when building it. A software like this one should be built almost from scratch without dependencies and focus on performance, portability (because portability without performance is useless) and bug free as possible.
30 bucks for a feature I can't use is not acceptable, and should be removed in my opinion, because it worsen launchbox's reputation.
Having 2s to 5s between each key press is terrible, who can find it acceptable at this point ? It's just a GUI.
 

Very strange… mine runs fine. I think I’m using the refried theme but never had an issue with lag between key presses. Sometimes the wheels in Bigbox take a half second  to load but that’s getting better. 

[daguerou]

I have tried all themes at this point and disabled almost all their options. My point is that I know some users are fine, that's not the point, point is you shouln't make a feature that is not certain to works on recent high specs computers, if it was free maybe you could argue it, even if my opinion would be the same, I wouldn't bother create an account just to write this comment.
If you search "big box slow" you will found countless of posts and "launchbox android slow" will pop up too. Why does a 50 dollards handheld console on aliexpress can display the images of  the game you scroll in 1 sec with a arm cortex and not even 1go of ram and this GUI software that runs on a AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS and 32 go RAM DDR4 will do it in 5 seconds? You have to question it when developing your software imo.
I think it comes to the point that companies always emphasize feature, even if it's buggy, and not user experience. There is a huge benefit to provide the best experience possible even if it's minimalistic, because the whole goal of a GUI like Big Box is that, nothing more. When you trade the experience to put a feature most users don't want that worsen it, day by day you moving away the usefulness of your software.
If it wasn't Big Box maybe you could tell me that Launchbox is more about managing your games library and emulator to have them in one interface, but Big Box is not that, and frankly it was the only reason why I bought the premium. If there was a trial, I wouln't be posting here too, but there's not.
 

Edited October 21, 2023 by daguerou

[eonder87]

My friend I encountered the slow speed problem but Launchbox's Default theme causes it. I changed that and my speed problem is resolved. SSD drives provide acceptable speed. Images videos and emulators need an SSD for speed. If you use a mechanical drive maybe they cause a slowness.

I accept minimalism for more speed but these features came with slowness. 

[xmas]

Hello Mate, I hear your frustration. I'm still waiting this to happen on LaunchBox. Someday..

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/62701-colorful-light-theme-community-theme-creator-version-need-testers/?do=findComment&comment=393340

[Nixx]

Agree, 100%, most of the bad review of launchbox is about his speed. That sould be the main developpement focus, not adding some fancy features related to store apps.

Speed with bigbox is ok though, my issue is only with launchbox. And i was so bored by it that i made a plugin for that (but using text-list not grid view) : 

 

[rotatorkuf]

i just don't get why posts like this aren't taken seriously...the performance is really bad for launchbox/bigbox when you compare it to other frontends, like emulationstation for example....

this frontend could really use a performance overhaul and it's really discouraging to see the "well it works fine for me, so it's an issue with your rtx 3080 and i7 13000 modern pc..."

like, enough of that, it doesn't help anyone, it's obvious that the performance is bad for enough users, i wish it would get looked at seriously

[zugswang]

On 12/12/2023 at 3:17 AM, rotatorkuf said:

i just don't get why posts like this aren't taken seriously...the performance is really bad for launchbox/bigbox when you compare it to other frontends, like emulationstation for example....

this frontend could really use a performance overhaul and it's really discouraging to see the "well it works fine for me, so it's an issue with your rtx 3080 and i7 13000 modern pc..."

like, enough of that, it doesn't help anyone, it's obvious that the performance is bad for enough users, i wish it would get looked at seriously

They know that they would literally need to strip LB down to the bare bones and start again to make the changes necessary to speed it all up, so it's not going to happen.

I agree speed is where LB struggles and it has always been the case (this should be the main issue to resolve instead of constantly adding more and more stuff to it, which just makes it even slower)

Everything you do on it is slow unless you only have a handful of systems on your setup, then it loads up quickly and exits quickly as it should, but the more you add, the slower it gets.

Sadly for me, I have 200,000 games with 100's of systems on my setup and it's literally unusable due to the slow loading and exiting of everything, meaning I have to split my collection up into bits like PC Games, Playstation 1,2, Playstation 3, XBOX 360 etc all running off separate LB setups which is not ideal.

On Hyperspin/RocketLauncher I have it all setup on there with 650 systems and it doesn't slow down anything, so there is obviously an issue somewhere.

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by zugswang

[C-Beats]

We are certainly aware there is room for improvement in regard to performance. Just because we don't respond to every post doesn't mean we don't see them. We've spent quite a bit of time in the past implementing performance improvements (even devoting entire release cycles to it), and I'm sure we will be doing more in the future. We've identified some potential places to increase performance but as @zugswang eluded, some of these changes aren't small and require altering a very large section of the codebase. Altering such a large chunk of code opens us up to a lot of potential to introduce new bugs, and also stops progression anywhere else in the app so it's a bit of a balancing act between making these changes and improving the software in other ways. As of right now I'm the sole individual developing on the PC apps and so we can only do so much with such a limited resource so I'd ask for a bit of patience to any requested changes. If that's not possible and you need to find an alternate solution then we understand. It's obviously not something we WANT to happen, but if our product isn't delivering where you need it to then we respect that you need to do what's best for you.

[izzishor]

So, It made me sad when I saw that almost all the topics in regards to performance have been closed or barely have any answers...
I have a pretty big collection (information about my arcade build, technical specifications and collection is here) 
 

And I've been having this problem for a while, LaunchBox freezes at random intervals for me and I literally have to wait for it to load back up, and unstuck itself, I could live with that because I mostly use BigBox...


However BigBox has it's own problems, I'm using Pulse as my favorite theme, however it does the same with default themes or others as well, it has huge slowdowns when scrolling trough games, (I have 3 screens on the Arcade, 2 of them running video: Main Screen and Marquee Screen and a static image Poster Screen) and I've tried with both VLC and MPlayer, and it always gets stuck, like 3-10 seconds wait time to change between the game, attract mode is out of the question, it's choppy and freezes.


What I've tried to do to fix it:

• Tried on multiple systems:
  • Monster Work PC (W10/W11 - RTX4090/i9/128GB/GEN3SSD, etc)
  • Main PC (W11 - Asus B550-E/32GB-DDR4/Ryzen7-5800X/RTX-4080/M2-SSD)
  • Arcade (I7/16GB-DDR3/RX6600/SSD)
  • Same slowdowns even though on Work PC and Main PC I only ran a single monitor.

 

• Reinstalling / Re-adding my collection
  • Clean installed on separate computers, nope, didn't work, even with default theme, no settings done to bigbox, if I run my collection, after hours of waiting to import games, and waiting to build a cache, still starts lagging and going choppy when in attract mode, or just holding down, or left trough scroll through the games.

 

• Updating or switching Video Player
  • I've tried both with VLC and MPlayer (same results, it's better with MPlayer for a while, then it borks down too)
  • Updating VLC x64 from zip file overwriting the files in the ThirdParty/VLC folder works for a while as well, then it starts going choppy again

 

I've resorted to clearing my cache every week and having a script scroll trough all games, one by one, so they can load at least once, that fixes it for a week or two...

But it's so bad I've started looking for alternatives... I would love to stay to launchbox because I've set it up in a way that I like, but the performance is literally driving me insane :))

Sorry for the wall of text:

TL;DR: BigBox scrolling performance is terrible, I've tried everything, pls fix/improve before adding "NEW" features not many people asked for, or i cry

------

Later Edit: I was writing this while @C-Beats wrote his reply, so I've read it after I've posted.
Thank you for the reply and your work <3, it at least sheds some light on the situation, rather than straight up ignoring or saying that there aren't any performance issues.

I may have a small suggestion that might fix some slowdowns, at least in cases like mine, that shouldn't require a full rewrite of the code.
Maybe finding a way to delay the videos (theme videos, marquee videos, etc) make them play after 2-3 settings of the game being selected, that way it does not fill the GPU queue or clogs up the video player, basically while scrolling trough games or while in attract mode, it should not play the videos instantly.

 

Edited December 12, 2023 by izzishor
I've read the reply above mine.

[C-Beats]

51 minutes ago, izzishor said:

I may have a small suggestion that might fix some slowdowns, at least in cases like mine, that shouldn't require a full rewrite of the code.
Maybe finding a way to delay the videos (theme videos, marquee videos, etc) make them play after 2-3 settings of the game being selected, that way it does not fill the GPU queue or clogs up the video player, basically while scrolling trough games or while in attract mode, it should not play the videos instantly.

This is already done by Default themes but there are bindings that make it possible for theme devs NOT to use it. Big Box performance can swing pretty wildly based on which theme you're using to be honest. We've given the theme devs enough options that it IS possible that some of them aren't using the most performant options. This is made even more clear when older themes aren't using newer controls we've built for that purpose in mind. I'd swap to Default for a bit and see if you still have the same performance issues there or not. If not then it's probably because of the how the theme was created. We do our best to ensure all themes run as well as possible, but there are enough options provided to the theme devs to make the themes the way they want it's just not possible for us to cover every possibility.

[Retro808]

Just want to add something about the affects of custom themes on performance.

I read this thread again and someone mentioned they tried all themes and even "disabled almost all their options". If you use a custom theme and go into LB/BB settings to disable some options this does not, in many cases, affect what a custom theme does. Those settings usually only work on the Default theme. A custom theme's coding can override what settings you have changed in the LB/BB settings page. Manually editing the code of the theme is typically needed. 

[izzishor]

Personally I have already tried the "default theme" and "old default", as well as "critical zone", and I have the same issue, regardless of settings, or system I use, if a playlist/system has more than 1000 games, it's a lagfest.

Only thing that fixes it is deleting bigbox cache and then going manually trough all the systems and go through all games, then it won't lag for a few weeks or untill the next update. 

 

Oh well. Ty for the answers.

[C-Beats]

That statement doesn't make a ton of sense to me since building the image cache in itself takes quite a bit of time, so deleting should make the issue worse (by far) not better. Are you running any sort of sync software that may be locking up files in the cache directory?

[izzishor]

Should I move this chat in private? Or it's ok to talk here? I don't want to steal this post, but I do want to share my experience and perhaps get a bit of help.

 

And to answer: No sir, I run nothing else than BigBox, it's database and roms from a fastish 2TB SSD

I run W11 with modified services on a different SSD and I have 2 more HDD's just for PC Games

Everything I don't need is turned off, I just have Fan Control, Xbox360ce and the SindenLightgun (in sleep mode) on startup, everything else (other than default win services) are off or manual.

Everything is up to date and all auto-updates are off, for everything.

I tried running BigBox as shell. Tried on fresh Win install

 

...So what I do to make it work is the following:

-I delete the caches from BB and LB

-I go in BB and select either Highest or High for images

-Then I refresh the images from BB.

Then I run an AHK script that just presses down arrow every 3 seconds, so that the images load for each game.

I have to do this for all platforms, and you can feel and see the difference instantly when all games images are loaded, the second you cache the last one, it's butter smooth.

And then time, or an update messes it up again...

[C-Beats]

15 hours ago, izzishor said:

Then I run an AHK script that just presses down arrow every 3 seconds, so that the images load for each game.

In the same menu that you clear image cache there is a menu item to build the image cache so you wouldn't need to do this step. It does take some time as it generates all cache images for all the games in your setup, but would be a safer way of doing that then the AHK script.