Insane loading startup time (10 seconds every time)

[Jo Taylor]

Why would it take any longer than 0.5 of a second to boot up? I have a ginormous collection of games yes, however any images for those games in library should be cached and saved after the first time.

It's taking over 10 seconds to start Launchbox every time now, which is making me feel it might be time to start looking at other options, since all I really want is a front end to help me browse my games QUICKLY, but as it stands, it's quicker to go through windows explorer, 10 levels of folders sometimes, just to find an exe shortcut, instead of waiting for Launchbox to boot up.

I have a £4000 gaming machine with 1tb SSD drive, and windows 10 64bit takes only seconds to load. Launchbox is currently the slowest software I have on my rig.

kind regards, steve.

[gt46l]

I have a brand new top of the line system as well and LB probably takes around 15 seconds to load. Thats not really a big deal for me since it just loads once. I do have a fair amount of lag when I switch between systems after its up. 2-4 seconds depending on what system I switch to. That part can be a bit annoying.

I am a developer and if I had to guess at the reason its all the xml parsing its doing on launch, and between system switches. I have a few system XML files 30mb or larger, and as a developer I've never found XML parsing to be fast. Its benefit is being highly portable, but not quick. I'm curious if database options have been evaluated for Launchbox (not having done any research on it), at least for the game file XMLs. The smaller system config and emulator XML files are perfect for their size, but when you get into gigabytes of data to store ROM file data, thats where databases generally provide an order of magnitude of speed increases.

[Jo Taylor]

Yea totally valid explanation :) Wish there was some way to... hmm have a portion of drive space committed to referencing a base cache which wouldnt need to scan everything unless it was told do so manually?

[gt46l]

I agree they could probably optimize the load process by preventing scans on everything right off the bat. For instance I've found that if I am on system A while playing games and then exit, the next time I load LB it is back on system A. I would suspect that its loading the XML for system A during launch because it shows when it finally comes up. If they just had it come up to no system at all, that could probably save up to 4 seconds off initial load. They probably find other situations like that as well. I don't think separate "cache" files would help because unless they were databases they'd be slow anyway, and it would present a code difficulty maintaining data integrity in main vs cache files. These optimzations wouldn't help the system to system switch time though, and actually any load optimization would just cause other things to be slow to load because those operations would still have to happen, but just when needed as opposed to all at once during load. To speed anything up beyond the initial load time, they would have to change from an XML to an indexed database backend like Kodi (SQLite).