[philzy]

Our XBMC setup has suddenly started playing up, its on a mega slow down and I have no idea why so hoping someone can help us out.

First up, the specs :

- Foxconn A76ML-K 3.0
- AMD Sempron 145 2.8GHz
- 2GB DDR3
- 160GB (OS) + 3 x 2TB (Movies) SATAII
- Nvidia GeForce GT 610
- Windows 7, XBMC 12.2, Latest GPU Drivers

- Log File

Secondly, the problem :

We recently reached the 1400 movie mark and roughly around that time XBMC went on a massive slow down. We are using the Aeon Nox skin and have our collection separated into 'categories/genres' like Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, etc. which are in smart playlists which I have linked to most of the home items (including the default ones), basically as it is done in this video. Each menu item has a backdrop and some has submenu items.

All was working perfectly until a few days ago when XBMC suddenly started going extremely slow. The backdrops take a long time to load, then going into a menu item takes much longer than usual, then the posters and backdrops take longer than usual to load and even navigating through the posters causes it to stutter and lag behind in updating posters and backdrops. This problem is made worse if I back out of the menu item and then enter another one, and sometimes even worse if I go into the Settings menu item to change something and then back out.

I have CTRL + ALT + DEL to bring up the task manager and to begin with it was saying XBMC was using 100% just idling on the main menu. So I looked that up on google and tried using dirty regions, this made little difference so I removed it from my advancedsettings.xml file and now XBMC will sit at 60%-70% at idle but the problem described above is still continuing.



I understand that our hardware is far from top end, but please bare in mind before you respond that it has been running perfectly until our collection creeped over 1400. Before suggesting new hardware we would appreciate other solutions to try first, but we do plan to purchase more RAM and an SSD to store the OS/XBMC in the near future.

I can record a video if my description above doesnt explain the problem very well.


EDIT : Forgot to mention, actually watching video files works perfectly even at 1080p. Having pressed 'o' whilst playing a movie, it says the core (single) hovers around 10%-20%. I then flipped the switch to allow XBMC to run in a fullscreen window so that I could bring up the task manager in front of XBMC whilst it was open. XBMC was at 100% whilst navigating the menu, a few seconds after the movie started playing it dropped to 30%-40% and sticks there. This is just an XBMC GUI navigation issue we are having.

Also just noticed that with the debug information on screen, if I navigate into the settings menu item and allow the CPU to rest (at 40%-50%) and then back out the main screen it goes banana's and hits 100% within seconds and stays there. I was suspecting it may be the 1080p wallpapers I have applied to each customized menu item we have (12 in total) but if I go into the "main menu item customizer" then it runs just fine displaying all backdrops perfecly and the CPU % is still low.

[philzy]

Still havent figured out the issue, could anyone lend a suggestion?

[ConfusedTA]

I'd be looking at your hard drive initially. Browsing around will be loading all the artwork from the hard drive. If this is beginning to fail, the delays in trying to load the artwork could cause your issues.

[philzy]

I'm not sure its the hard drive, there's no clicking coming from it and its not consistently slow. Is there any way I can test the drive to see if its failing?

I have uploaded a video of our HTPC in action, which has embarrassingly caught me on camera in the reflection.



The red backdrops are 120x67 jpgs, as I wanted to see if the 1920x1080 files I was using were causing the issue. See how the CPU usage drops shortly after entering the main menu item customizer and then rockets back up to 100% when exiting back to home screen. It never used to behave like this, I added a few new movies and then its acted like this since.

[ConfusedTA]

Try out HDTune

[philzy]

I will try that program. Having just switched from Aeon Nox to Confluence, I can confirm that it is an Aeon Nox issue as CPU is at 50% whilst idling on home screen with the Confluence skin applied.

Can a mod please review my thread and decide whether this belongs here or in the Aeon Nox part of the forum.

[philzy]

140 views, come on guys. Someone must have a suggestion

[Frozin]

i'm currently having the same woe's as you. My previous installs of xbmc the cpu usage on confluence was 13-20 percent my new install is 80-100 and creates lag up the ass.

[jhhoffma]

Since you think it's skin specific you may want to post over in the Aeon Nox forum (or maybe a mod will be kind enough to move the thread).

Maybe you can uninstall the skin and reinstall it? Or try another skin like Ace and see if the issue recurs.

[philzy]

For anyone else who stumbles across this thread, I fixed the issue by deleting guisettings.xml and setting things up again the way I wanted it. Strange bug but I wasnt going to waste my time trying to find it.

[Kib]

Probably related to scripts running to show the random or recent items.