[Johno_c]

Hi guys, so i was fed up of streaming xbmc to my tv via my old knackered laptop, bought myself a raspberry pi all preloaded with raspbmc.

Its seem a little slow to me and was wondering if there is any quick and easy ways to help speed it up a little.

Raspbmc is on a 4gb sd card and im hardwired via ethernet.

If there is a way please either give me a step by step guide or a link to one, much appreciated.

Thanks in advance john

[popcornmix]

You should play with the overclock settings. If the top setting works for you it makes a big improvement.

A gotham build will be faster (but may not compatible with all addons. The miappa build here has lots of performance tweaks:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=176043

It may be worth benchmarking the sdcard. Good 4K random access results are most important to good performance.

Until all the textures have been cached, xbmc runs slower. This happens automatically as you browse, but you can force it to happen with the Texture Cache Maintenance utility:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=158373

[Bosse_B]

4GB is a bit on the small side..
What speed class is your SDcard?
I use a SanDisk 16 GB Ultra card and I don't think it is very slow.

[DBMandrake]

4GB is too small if you have your Library (fan art/thumbnail caches etc) on the local system drive - I only have about 300 movies and maybe a hundred TV episodes (all stored on another machine) and my .xbmc directory is 2.8GB, so allowing for the size of Raspbmc itself I would be out of room already on a 4GB card.

I'd recommend 8GB minimum, and if you want to have some room for temporary downloads 16GB is nice.

For speed there's a number of things you can do -

* Choose a fast SD card, they vary from painfully slow to pretty fast depending on make/model

* Some people find a USB install is faster, in that case you need a fast USB stick instead and SD card speed and size don't matter.

* use the f2fs filesystem - now the default on fresh installs of raspbmc so you should already have it.

* install miappa's latest Gotham beta build as linked above - MUCH faster than Frodo and very stable now. All the addons I use are compatible but your mileage may vary. Not too difficult to install if you follow the instructions in the thread popcornmix linked to carefully. Running a Gotham beta is probably the single biggest improvement to speed you can make.

* try overclocking - I run at super overclock without problems but each Pi has a different maximum speed that it can run at so it takes some trial and error to see how high you can go. Overclocking also requires a good power supply.

* edit /boot/cmdline.txt and change dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=0 to dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=1 - this will give about a 15% speed increase for free.

[Johno_c]

Thanks for the advice guys.