EmulationStation GUI sluggish with scrapped systems

pjft

Might be a throughput thing with loading the images. What resolution are they and what's the file size?

I find that reading from the SD card is in general slower than reading from the USB drive so if you'd have the chance to move the images and the gamelist paths to point to the USB drive, just to test for one of the systems, for instance, that would be interesting to see.

Do you have videos as well?

RedDog

@pjft said in EmulationStation GUI sluggish with scrapped systems:

Might be a throughput thing with loading the images. What resolution are they and what's the file size?

I find that reading from the SD card is in general slower than reading from the USB drive so if you'd have the chance to move the images and the gamelist paths to point to the USB drive, just to test for one of the systems, for instance, that would be interesting to see.

Do you have videos as well?

The images are what was grabbed with the integrated scraper. Resolutions range from 400x426 to 400x455 and the sizes range from 30KB to 360KB. I've not tried to add videos. With the delay occurring with simple images, I didn't want to go there yet.

I do not know how to change gamelist paths to place additional data on the drive, so I will have to get back to you on that after I figure it out. I am very unknowledgeable about this stuff.

AlexMurphy

[Redacted]

pjft

@RedDog sure. Happy to help though.

Are you comfortable with doing some work on the terminal?

pjft

@RedDog Actually, taking a bit more time to read, and being on my laptop now where it's easier to write, here are a few comments:

It seems that you may benefit from updating EmulationStation from source, if you have just installed it from the image. There may be some useful changes on image handling and such.
I haven't found EmulationStation navigation between hames to be particularly slow for me, but once again that's always subjective, and what happens for one person doesn't necessarily reflect others' experience. What theme are you using?
I have found, from past subjective experience, that multiple non-sequential reads from the SD card feel slower than from the USB drive. I have no factual research or insights around that (though I suppose it'd be easy to do a few searches), but it's my impression. You may be better off reading that media from the USB drive.
One thing that may help, then, is to run @sselph 's scraper on your computer first, rather than on the Pi. Not only will it likely scrape things faster on the computer, you'll end up with an automatic generated gamelist on your ROM folder as well as the images being stored in the "images" subfolder under the ROM folder (which I assume is on the USB drive), rather than on the SD card's ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_imagesfolder, I believe. You can download it here. I certainly did my scraping on the computer first and found it helpful. The image resolutions don't seem to be out of the ordinary, so that in itself shouldn't be the problem.
You can do it for a single system and test it out. You may end up having to remove the previous gamelist file (I recommend backing it up). It should be on your ROM folder.

Hope this helps.

RedDog

After working on things a bit more, I found that the retropie GUI menu was also sluggish in the same way when first booted up. So I decided to reimage the card, test from scratch, and then begin to slowly add things back in. At this point, I do not have the sluggishness in the GUI and most of the gamelists now have images. It did not appear to be related to the theme, although at one point I began to have a feeling that it may have had to do with the number of roms moved onto the USB drive at one time.

Now that I have a better idea of how responsive EmulationStation can be, at least I have something to shoot for in case I need to restart again.

I appreciate your advice. At some point, I am going to try offloading the assets to the USB driver to speed things up even more.

pjft

@RedDog great to hear, and sorry you're going through that.

Do let us know if we can help, and definitely consider scraping things on your computer.

RWM79

@RedDog I know you have resolved it for now, but I had the same issue but it was just with 1 game. I could browse down through my list just fine, but when I got to that one game - 2 second delay as I hit it and then it loaded fine. I could go past that game and everything below it was fine - everything above it was fine, but when I scrolled to that single game - it would have the delay. It turned out that the image it was trying to load was actually missing, but I had it setup to show video so I never knew the image was missing.

Sounds like this may not have been the case for you since you were just using images, but I thought I would share.

I think ES processes every piece of metadata whether it uses it to display in the Detail or Video view or not.

RedDog

@pjft Thanks again for the help. I needed someplace to start from and you gave me some things to think about that gave me the direction.

@RWM79 My situation is a bit different in that it really was anything that had a graphic tied to it.

So I did some more work on the Pi3 and the GUI sluggishness it happened again. This was after doing a reformat of the USB drive and placing the files back on. I decided to redo the USB drive from scratch by formatting it, adding the retropie directory, letting Retropie create the file structure, and THEN moving the files back...and everything worked great, until I moved more files. So I then renamed the retropie directory to retropie_old, created a new retropie directory, let retropie create the structure, and then copied the files over...and it worked great again. So, while I don't know why the issue would happen, I at least have an easy fix.

Anyway, I am starting to learn the a few ins and out. I've got root access to the Pi3 via filezilla so I can change some configs. I've done some tinkering in the ternimal. It's a start.

spruce_m00se

just FYI,
I have at least 6 systems on mine, with 20 or so roms in each, some have more, and I have ZERO delay between pressing down and the cursor moving, there is a small (200ms) or so delay in showing the metadata, but not in the cursor moving or the sound effect being played.

I run everything directly from a 64gb U3 micro sd card, (i think its U3, could be wrong, but its a fast one)

AlexMurphy

@spruce_m00se I have 16 systems, approx 1000 ROMs, on a 32GB card. Class 6, I think. I have had no issues since updating. I know we love to help people here but sometimes you just need to wipe and start over!

spruce_m00se

@AlexMurphy then make your own image when you have a working system!

AlexMurphy

@spruce_m00se I do. Once a month. As a back-up.

pjft

@AlexMurphy @spruce_m00se I am kind of paranoid about that, so I sometimes end up doing one every week or couple of weeks. It's still a sense of frustration when something goes wrong and I need to go back to a backup, though - "oh, what did I do or change since then, that I'm not remembering now?".

It's really a minor problem though.

AlexMurphy

@pjft It depends how often you change things, I suppose. And how much free disk space you have. I have things pretty much as I want these days, so once a month does me for back-ups.

RedDog

What do you use to create an image? Just pop the card in a SD Adaptor and use any Windows imaging software?

AlexMurphy

@RedDog I use Win32DiskImager. Etcher would work too. If you want to save space on your disk you can zip it and compress it.

RedDog

@AlexMurphy Cool, thanks.

pjft

@RedDog If I was on Windows I'd probably do that. Interested in learning what people use.

I'm on a Mac, so I use ApplePi-Baker, though I won't recommend it directly as it's closed source and requests your sudo password to run dd (which is needed, but still doesn't make me less suspicious).

@AlexMurphy you're right, that's what I aim to get to as well. My problem is that, between listening to old games' podcasts or having old games come to mind every now and then, I'm frequently adding "oh, just one more game" to the collection. Last week I took note of a couple ZX Spectrum games I forgot to add originally, so those will make it there soon. :)

AlexMurphy

@pjft Yip. I know. And I keep doing the same but it's good to have a point to start from. At the moment I'm really only trying to get obscure stuff set up. I got Daphne working... which I was amazed at, and never play because it is shite. All my ROMs are on the laptop or just a click away.