[Sarcasmo]

Hi All,


I recently re-purposed an old windows 7 box as a dedicated media server. I have 2 xbmc instances running (win7 and openelec - both gotham). As such I thought it would be a good time to look at using a shared library. I followed the setup guide and got everything working pretty much without incident. However, as soon as i started using the setup I noticed lag, not really bad lag but just enough to irritate.

Where I've found it most noticeable is when browsing tv series. When I click into a series to season level and click back to series list, there is a half to two second delay before backdrop and poster is populated.
Occasionally there will be a short buffering/working wait while going between these levels. Oddly, I have noticed that its much less noticeable towards the top of the list and much more the further down you go (which make me wonder if it just needs more time to cache the images or something?) Beyond that, i'm just finding that browsing libraries in general is sluggish.

So my question; is this to be expected? or am i missing something very obvious. I cant imagine many people would be using this solution if this is the experience. I've looked online quite a bit but a lot of the info appears to be outdated. For the record though I have done the skip-name-resolve thing, didn't appear to make any difference at all. FYI - my libraries and not outrageously big, approx 250 tv series & 200 movies

Any help/advise at all would be very much appreciated. It would appear to be a the ideal library configuration for my setup. Id really love to get it working properly.

Many thanks

[nickr]

There are three potential sources for delays here:

1. Querying the mysql database for what to display - the dB has the URL of a picture to diplay for each item; and

2. Lookin in your local hard drive at textures.db to see if the picture is cached there.

3. If it is not there, get it from the specified URL (and saving it in the cache for next time).

A debug log (wiki) may tell us where the delay is coming from. Pre-caching using Milhouse's texture cache utility os a one off that may prevent future delays.

[PH-SYM]

I had a similar problem in the music database, where entering every artist folder took ~10 seconds each time. The problem was mostly solved by switching to a different database engine. A lot of the MySQL servers use the MyIsam engine as default which is much slower than InnoDB, at least in the way XBMC makes use of it. By switching to InnoDB most of the delay was gone. The rest was done with some tweaking of the MySQL settings (amount of cache etc.)
Some delay is probably inevitable since keeping everything local is always faster but it isn't really noticable anymore.

Another reason could be that you have redirected your thumbnailcache to a shared folder. Do NOT do that, thumbnails should be cached locally, not only for speed but also to prevent some other issues.