XBMC Menus sometimes lag
#1
Hi,

I have a multiroom setup comprising three ATV1s with Openelec and one iMac running OSX Lion as the server.

I often find that when scrolling through my TV shows library on the ATVs that the menu is laggy, often getting stuck seemingly whilst it is trying to load the background image.

It is frustrating and I do not understand why. Can anyone suggest how I can go about diagnosing the issue?

Thanks

Andy
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#2
Are you using the default Confluence skin or did you switch to something else that may be more resource intensive?
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#3
I just upgraded from 11.0 to 12.2 the other day, using xbmc locally I found while scrolling thru a list of tv/movies it would take abou 5 seconds to load the fanart , I normally use transparency skin but same issue with confluence.

It was only a one-time slow down for each show I viewed, so it must of been building some cache of the art, maybe you are seeing something similar. I never had this issue in 11.0, I could view the fanart instantly for newly added shows.

CK
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#4
XBMC 12+ changed the way thumbnails are used so i believe it was re-caching all your thumbs
edit.. thats why you dont read the last post and reply..

to OP: it may be a combination of how heavy (resource intensive) the skin your using is and the low power of your machines. I have a xios, and it sometimes operates like you mention; does it perform better on a cold boot vs been on for a few days, ive noticed that is the case with mine. you may want to turn off backgrounds/fan art and see if that makes a difference or you can narrow down to something else.
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#5
I have found that you can improve this situation by using advancedsettings.xml to control the quality of the artwork that is cached.

With lower powered HTPCs I've managed to improve the responsiveness of the UI by using the following setting in Frodo (12.2):

Code:
3.37 <imageres>
FRODO FEATURE:
This tag is new for Frodo, replacing <thumbsize>.
Specify the maximal resolution that art should be resized to in pixels. The width is automatically calculated as being 16/9*height. The image will be resized to fit within this size. e.g. an image that is 2000x500 will be cached at size 1280x320. An image that is 500x800 will be cached at size 450x720 using the default value of 720.
<imageres>720</imageres>

As you can see, the default value is 720.

If you decrease that to something like 450 (800x450 = 16:9 aspect ratio) you should find that XBMC caches much smaller images and consequently the UI responds far better.

You will need to experiment a bit to find a value that gives you the balance of image quality and UI responsiveness you are looking for.

Start with a low number to prove that it helps, then increase it until the performance is no longer acceptable again.
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