Launchbox and bigbox are too slow / crash

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

I bought Launchbox 1 year ago, when the project started, on that time, launchbox was too slow for my game collection (over 20.000 games), so after a lot of problems I decided to switch back to Maximus arcade again.

A few days ago, after all the updates and news about this FE, I decided to give it a try again, I bough the life time premium version and installed it, started to upload all my games...after 22.799 games guess what... launchbox is horrible slow and unusuable.

• 10 seconds waits every time I switch a game collection
• lags a lot if I press page up or page down to browse games, images never seem to cache...they take 3 seconds to appear
• launchbox crashes everytime I add new games after 20.000 games, I have to add a new collection, close launchbox and open it again or it will just crash If I try to add two new platforms on one session.

I got so mad that I went ahead and upgraded the PC...and guess what...no changes...images load a little faster but it keeps been very very slow.

arcade specs (after the upgrade)

Core 2 Quad 3.2ghz 4GB Ram ddr2 Launchbox and OS are installed on Kingston HyperX SSD 240GB

I do not understand how maximus arcade and hyperspin can be lighting fast with the same collection (I didnt add any games, just used the same collection on launchbox.)

1 year of improvements and no speed improvements

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

I'm watching the cpu and ram usage... CPU usage (overall) 40% while using launchbox, 10% while idle on launchbox.

Ram 2.115 while on launchbox, ledblinky and some small programs are on the background, I have 4GB ram, so there is a lot of free ram (this is while in desktop mode, when I launch the arcade explorer.exe is never executed, so there is even more free ram)

Why on earth is launchbox so slow? It seems that the computer is very fast and has a lot of free resources.

[Jason Carr]

Hi Martin, I'm sorry to hear. I am happy to offer you a refund if you'd like. High PC specs are required for extremely large collections like 20,000+ games. Core 2 Quad CPUs are now something like 8-10 years old, so the performance issues are not surprising. We are using more modern technologies than the opposing FEs which is part of the reason for the discrepancy. There have been plenty of speed improvements in the past year but unfortunately that hardware will not be capable of running things smoothly. Email me at [e-mail] and I can issue you a refund.

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

All movies, pictures and everything are downloaded on the launchbox directory on the SSD.

[Jason Carr]

Hi Martin, the CPU is definitely the bottleneck here.

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

No need for refunds, I'm making a new arcade with a high end computer in 1 month, this other arcade will be using high end computer games too like mortal kombat, so I guess ill use launchbox on that system, still, i wish launchbox would work fast on the old system too, there seems to be a lot of free resources for launchbox, cpu usage is low, maybe it is a cache problem?

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

Do you think a i3 will go faster than a core 2 quad?

[Jason Carr]

Hi Martin, part of the reason is due to there being multiple cores on the CPUs. Depending on how many "theads" are running at a time, only so many cores can be used at once, which is why you're not seeing 100% CPU usage. This is typical for modern applications. There is always more that can be done to help performance, and we'll continue to come back to it to try and keep things as performant as possible. It's always a difficult line to ride between new features and improving things performance-wise, but it is a focus. Thanks for sticking with us.

An i3 would definitely be faster, yes, though of course an i5 or an i7 would be best. But you should see some huge performance improvements with the latest generations of CPUs. A decent video card is also important for smooth graphics in Big Box.

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

Hi, I made a big improvement, now each platform loads in less than 5 seconds and images load very fast (1 second when page up or page down or scroll very fast)

Go to system - Advanced features - Turn on cache in manual mode - make cache on your ssd (I used 4096 min - 12228 max) Launchbox should work a little faster now.

Go to launchbox - options - ram cache - I used 2048 cache.

Now launchbox goes a LOT faster.

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

Another update, I configured bigbox to use VLC and now things go even faster, that is strange, according to the note on bigbox vlc should go slower XD