ES Config Slow?

[Agrajag]

I've noticed, not unsurprisingly, that as I add platforms that when I re-load EmulationStation spends more and more time on the config portion of its start-up. I'm currently loading, Mame, Atari 2600, PS1, TG16, NeoGeo, Genesis, NES, SNES. Still looking to add Dreamcast, ColecoVision, Intellivision and Daphne.

A. Is this normal and expected?

B. Is there something that can be done to dramatically speed this up? The mSD card is a 32gb EVO Plus.

Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB, Ethernet.

[dankcushions]

@agrajag it's normal, especially if you have 100s of games on these platforms. it may improve with subsequent emulationstation updates (you could try installing emulationstation-dev from experimental packages if you wanted).

personally, i keep my pi on 24/7. power consumption is very low.

[Agrajag]

@dankcushions It's at 51 seconds now and I do keep mine on, but since I'm still doing lots of additions, scraping, tweaking and pruning, I end up needing to reboot quite a bit.

Good to know it's normal.

[mitu]

Do you have your ROM folders on the network on the sdcard ?

[Agrajag]

@mitu The ROM folders are on the network via Samba shares. However, all scraped media is on the microSD card.

I noticed something else of growing importance. Remember, my ES load time is just a hair under 60 seconds. However, last night I completed about 95% of scraping the full SNES catalog (about 100 short) so that's roughly 3,300 video snippets, covers, screenshots and marquees along with text descriptions. My load time is now 88 seconds.

Given that I still have to scrape several other systems (and I'm now guessing scraping MAME is just out of the question) I'm concerned that I'll be measuring load times that will run MANY minutes long.

So, given this, what are the best ways to combat this?

Thanks....

[mitu]

@agrajag said in ES Config Slow?:

So, given this, what are the best ways to combat this?

Once you've scraped everything, turn on the 'Parse Metadata Only' option in EmulationStation and no folders will be read on startup.

Or just use a wired connection/local sdcard for ROMs and metadata.

[Agrajag]

@mitu Options are great to have so some combination here will likely do the trip.

The Parse Metadata Only option will likely be the ultimate choice. I'll just have to remember to disable that whenever I make scrape changes.

For clarity sake, my Pi 4 is on an Ethernet connection. Are you saying that if I move all the ROMS to the microSD card that this will end up speeding this all up without the "Parse" option above?

I'm essentially balancing a couple things in my house. My son has a complete set of ROMS and finds it "silly" to duplicate them and manage them on the Pi when you can just point at where they already exist, however, we're talking ultimately may terabytes of data there. The systems I want to emulate will still be pretty huge in the end:

Atari2600, ColecoVision, Intellivision, TG16, Genesis, NES, SNES, PSX, Daphne, NeoGeo, Dreamcast and, of course, MAME. All in, that's likely about 50,000 roms and 50,000 covers, marquees, videos, etc.

I could take the time to cull it all back, but having the metadata actually helps to make that so much easier.

[Agrajag]

@mitu I'll find out a lot more about local storage as I have an Experimental Pi PiBoy DMG showing up tomorrow where everything on it will need to be local.

[mitu]

@agrajag said in ES Config Slow?:

The Parse Metadata Only option will likely be the ultimate choice. I'll just have to remember to disable that whenever I make scrape changes.

If you're using an external scraper (like Skyscraper), you can still scrape after toggling the option on. The scraper will add the necessary entries to gamelist.xml and they'll appear (game & artwork) in EmulationStation.

For clarity sake, my Pi 4 is on an Ethernet connection. Are you saying that if I move all the ROMS to the microSD card that this will end up speeding this all up without the "Parse" option above?

It will probably speed it up, but the fastest way is still using the option, especially if you have a large number of games. If you hit more than 50000 games, I expect you'll be having memory issues aswell. On the Pi4, they may not be so easy to trigger if you have more than 1Gb.

[Agrajag]

@mitu Thanks for the great info. I think the best path forward is to make sure I don't link directly to the MAME roms on the network and just manage that one manually.

There was a major question as to whether to build a PC-based emulation machine or a Pi-based on and since 99% of what I want to run is at least 15 years old or older, the Pi seemed like a good place to start.

[Agrajag]

@mitu Oh, one last question on this: Just want to verify that the setting in question is "Parse Gamelists Only" as that's what I find under "Other Settings". No "Parse Metadata Only". I'm pretty sure that's right as when I restarted, the boot was nearly instant.

[mitu]

@agrajag Yes, that's the one.