(2018-10-06, 19:58)black_eagle Wrote: Can't say I've ever had a problem with TVH being slow to start. Just checked that directory given in the article and there are 9663 files in the data directory and 10931 in the meta directory. I have never as far as I can remember, deleted anything from it..... Might be a disk space issue at some point, but as TVH only downloads to that cache every so often, and only serves the icons currently in the guide, I can't really see why it would cause it to start slowly. Not cleaning it up is something that needs addressing, but for the flexibility of having TVH update any channel names and icons that may change, I can live with it for now. Besides, I have 4 kodi instances pointing at the server and it would be a pain to set up channel icons on each of them individually.
You won't see the issue until you have been running Tvheadend for quite some time, but the issue is that in the current versions it never deletes anything - so if it ever saves an icon, even for something you only briefly look at in the guide, that icon will be there forever unless you clean it. Supposedly this will be addressed in Tvheadend 4.4 but who knows when that will appear, of if they'll really fix it. But rest assured the problem is real - I had a backend where Tvheadend was taking between 5-10 MINUTES to start up after a reboot, then I found that article and now it's back to coming up almost immediately after the system finishes rebooting.
As for it being "a pain" to store the channel icons on each system running Kodi, I'm not sure why, you just create the icon directory on one system and then copy the entire directory to the other systems over your local network. The main problems I found with storing the TV channel icons on the backend were these:
- Slows Kodi startup and causes unexpected crashes. But YMMV on this; some people say they have not seen this issue, but others have reported it. And admittedly I haven't tried it since probably Kodi Isengard, or thereabouts.
- Tvheadend prefers "picons", most of which are low quality garbage in my personal opinion. Seriously, maybe some people could not care less if their icons are fuzzy pieces of shit, but I do and I absolutely refuse to use them. When you store the icons on each system individually they can be any size you like (despite what some Kodi documentation may tell you) and Kodi will scale them for you, so they appear the correct size (though obviously it doesn't make sense to use super huge images; they just need to be large enough so that the icons don't appear fuzzy or blocky in Kodi).
- And of course there is the problem that if you try to clean out all the old accumulated cruft because Tvheadend is getting slow to start, you may wipe out all your channel icons.
It's your system so you can do what you like; I'm just saying that the one time I tried storing the icons in Tvheadend I did not like the results at all!
