Win Kodi 14.0 / 14.1 - very slow start
#31
This issue seems to have been improved somewhat in the nightly builds; on my system it now takes around 7 seconds to start.

Edit: It wasn't the nightly build that improved startup time for me. Reinstalling Beta 5 revealed that it also now starts faster. The only other thing that changed in my system during the same time period was my graphics card; replacing my old nvidia 660 with a 980, while still using the same driver version.
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#32
Absolutely no improvement for me, even with the nightly builds.
And it seems to get more and more worse.
Fresh install and 23 seconds until the splash screen loads..(not the first run)
But in the meantime, I hardly doubt, that the developers take a look into that.

Debug Log
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#33
(2014-12-09, 06:29)vel2000 Wrote: Absolutely no improvement for me, even with the nightly builds.
And it seems to get more and more worse.
Fresh install and 23 seconds until the splash screen loads..(not the first run)
But in the meantime, I hardly doubt, that the developers take a look into that.

Debug Log

Yeah i have this exact problem. about 23 seconds on clean boot on SSD, with old settings, addons, database etc, its about 32 seconds.
XBMC boot : 1-2 seconds, 4 seconds to ready to navigate with AEON skin.

When comparing the 2 log files from XBMC to KODI each action takes 3-4x times longer on kodi, logfile is about the same length.
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#34
I was wrong about the nightly builds improving the slow start. I re-installed Beta 5 and it now also starts in about 4-5 seconds rather than the 25 seconds it took last time I had it installed.

The only other thing that had changed in my system during the same period was that I upgraded to a new graphics card, going from an nvidia 660 to a 980. The drivers are the same.

Is it possible that this start up delay is somehow connected to determining the capabilities of the graphics card, supported resolutions and so on, which is done early during the start up process?
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#35
@sialivi: yes this appears to be the case, we just can't get a dev to confirm it or why it happens only to a certain percentage of us. all the debug logs show exactly were the slow down occurs, right when its determining the supported resolutions.
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#36
This has been driving me nuts, so I tried to dig into what is going on. I think I found something that may help...

My HTPC starts EventGhost at via the task scheduler, and then EventGhost starts Kodi. Like other people here, startup became very slow a while back. I would usually end up VNC-ing in, killing Kodi, opening task manager and starting a new Kodi process from there. The new Kodi process performed normally. There was no difference in the debug logs, the task scheduler -> eventghost one was just slower.

I figured there had to be some difference in the processes themselves, so I compared a "good" and "bad" Kodi process in process explorer. They were identical in every way I could see, with the exception that the bad one was associated with a Windows job object. Windows jobs are a way of managing groups of processes that not many things use, but task scheduler does. When a process associated with a job calls CreateProcess() to start a child process (most things use this function), it is implicitly associated with the parent's job. Per MSDN, the implicit association does not happen if the WMI Win32_Process.Create() method is used to start the child.

So instead of having EventGhost start Kodi directly, I now have it run a tiny script that starts Kodi using WMI. Problem went away immediately. I have absolutely no idea why being in a job would do this, and I haven't had time to set up a debugger to get to the root cause.

In case anyone else wants to use this workaround, create a text file named "kodi.vbs" and paste this in:

Code:
Option Explicit
Dim strKodiCmd, objW32Process
strKodiCmd = """C:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\Kodi.exe"" -fs"
Set objW32Process = GetObject("winmgmts:Win32_Process")
objW32Process.Create(strKodiCmd)

Edit the strKodiCmd = line as necessary (use a pair of double quotes wherever you would normally use a double quote for escaping). Then, in whatever you use to start Kodi, have it run
Code:
wscript.exe C:\path\to\your\script\kodi.vbs
instead. You could do this in any language that can use WMI, VBScript is probably best because it's fast to start, doesn't show a console window and is included on all versions of Windows.

In case it's helpful, I'm on Win 8.1 x64 and have an AMD Radeon 5570 GPU.
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#37
^^
Please read the former posts!
Yours is a completely different issue and has nothing to do with the initial problem.
I don't use Eventghost or any other script/scheduler, but always starting Kodi directly.
This is just a bug somewhere in Kodi, but unfortunately none of the developers seems to care about.
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#38
(2014-12-12, 22:24)helta Wrote: @sialivi: yes this appears to be the case, we just can't get a dev to confirm it or why it happens only to a certain percentage of us. all the debug logs show exactly were the slow down occurs, right when its determining the supported resolutions.

Hiya there,
I found a workaround for this slow startup of KODI. Please see my post here: Please click
A culprit is related with how logging is operating. But I need to say that with XBMC 13.2 I never had that problem, even though logging is enabled there. With KODI 14.0 I have this problem if logging is enabled. With this workaround we disable logging completely and KODI starts fast.
best, d.
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#39
I can confirm, this "workaround" works for me too.
So it seems, there is some glitch in the logging module?
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#40
@delfincek: well holy crap, that actually does solve the problem. hats off to you sir.

@devs: can you guys look into this?
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#41
(2014-12-27, 05:06)helta Wrote: @devs: can you guys look into this?
I've already suggested solution in the ticket #15535 listed before.
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#42
I'm having the same problem with Kodi final as well. Turning off logging helped with the startup slowness. Though I still have a slowness when starting to play any media. Takes ~3 secs to play a file, former versions were instant. Also getting way more crashes than I ever did.

Info:
Start from EG
Win7 + SSD
Nvidia(latest drivers) w/ HDMI audio
Central media DB
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#43
I didn't have the loglevel stet in advancedsettings, but I did have component logging enabled. (Though I had the other option which prints log stats to screen disabled). I turned that off - it's faster now.

I also deleted a few hundred lines from my settings for skins that I no longer use. I don't know if that had any effect.
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#44
Same with 14.1!
Seems none of the Dev is interested in this issue.
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#45
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Kodi 14.0 / 14.1 - very slow start0