Thumbnails slow on 6.4.3

[skyeclad]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Well, in my case I can say it hasn't sped up the UI at all. True, before this change a page down on the videos page 'blocked' for maybe a second while getting the thumbnails from the server, whereas now the cursor moves instantly. But now I have to stare at the placeholder icon (or empty space if reconfigured) for four or five seconds - so effectively it's way slower than before. I completely understand the rationale behind this change, and architecture-wise it surely might be the right way to do it, but the effect unfortunately is that the UI experience suffers, at least on certain systems.

Dirk

I agree, on my system, the thumbnails take up to 3 seconds to appear effectively negating any UI speed-up that was intended.

[tmiranda]

There is an option that controls how long (in milliseconds) after the last keystroke is entered to delay before the thumbnails are loaded. Change it to a small number and they will appear faster. I did not like the delay either so I set mine to 250.

[nick_l]

Ok, I wasn't going to say anything about this, because I've been kind of whiny lately, but...

I don't understand why Sage is delaying the loading of the thumbnails. Why can't Sage PRELOAD the thumbs instead. It must be possible, because when browsing the program guide, the channel icons show up immediately.

I wouldn't mind if sage kept in memory a permanent cash of the thumbnails. I would assume that most of us have a decent amount of memory installed on our machines. but alternately, why cant it look ahead to the next x number of pages when I, for instance, browse my DVD collection. Surely it can be assumed that if someone opens the music/video/picture browsing screens that they will be looking at more than one screens worth of thumbs.


Nick

[Razillian]

There are plenty of people here with several hundred to over a thousand movies in their video libraries. That is a whole heck of a lot to cache. I think caching a couple pages at a time would recreate the problem that Sage fixed with the delayed loading of thumbs, that was the screen freezing up when people were trying to scroll through their library (because Sage was trying to load thumbnails). So now you can just set the delay time based on your system, for me a setting of 100ms works great. Others might want(need) more delay.

[nick_l]

Originally Posted by Razillian

There are plenty of people here with several hundred to over a thousand movies in their video libraries. That is a whole heck of a lot to cache. I think caching a couple pages at a time would recreate the problem that Sage fixed with the delayed loading of thumbs, that was the screen freezing up when people were trying to scroll through their library (because Sage was trying to load thumbnails). So now you can just set the delay time based on your system, for me a setting of 100ms works great. Others might want(need) more delay.

I don't agree. I just checked my sage generated thumbnails folder. The entire folder is only 18.8MB. It is from my last install, april 8th and contains several thousand thumbnails, including all the shows that I have watched/deleted since then. I know that I could take the memory hit, and I assume that most of use could too (if you cant spare 18 megs of ram... Yikes.) My point though is that would not all need to be cached all the time.

In my opinion any delay is unacceptable. If Sage wants to become the primary media player for most people (and if they were smart they would) they need to step up. If im browsing 3 thousand albums, any delay between scrolling screens gets old VERY FAST. One of the very best features of Sage is its multi-room/multi media flexibility. the excitement dims for me however, when the experience is tarnished by things like a UI delay.

Nick

[skyeclad]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

There is an option that controls how long (in milliseconds) after the last keystroke is entered to delay before the thumbnails are loaded. Change it to a small number and they will appear faster. I did not like the delay either so I set mine to 250.

Is this option available in SageMC or just the default UI?

[technazz]

Originally Posted by skyeclad

Is this option available in SageMC or just the default UI?

Default UI only. You can load up the default UI edit the setting and then switch back to SageMC and the property will stick.

Technazz

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by nick_l

I don't agree. I just checked my sage generated thumbnails folder. The entire folder is only 18.8MB. It is from my last install, april 8th and contains several thousand thumbnails, including all the shows that I have watched/deleted since then. I know that I could take the memory hit, and I assume that most of use could too (if you cant spare 18 megs of ram... Yikes.) My point though is that would not all need to be cached all the time.

Nick

What you miss in that calculation is that those files take only 18.8MB of COMPRESSED space. To cache them in memory they need to be decompressed. A typical JPEG compression ratio is about 25:1 so that'd actually take ~500MB of space to cache.

[nick_l]

Originally Posted by Narflex

What you miss in that calculation is that those files take only 18.8MB of COMPRESSED space. To cache them in memory they need to be decompressed. A typical JPEG compression ratio is about 25:1 so that'd actually take ~500MB of space to cache.

1. Narflex, It's always great to see you on the forums. It just tickles me that you take time to come here and respond.

2. What!?!? What are you guys doing to .jpgs over there? The algorithm for the file compresses when you save the file. excess information is removed from the file to reduce the size. when you open the file that information doesn't magically come back. It's not like a zip archive where a file is basically compressed then needs to be "put back together" before its reopened.

When I open my image viewer (thumbs plus, in this case) to view my over 30,000 saved images with thumbnails my memory usage doesn't suddenly jump by hundreds of megs.

Even if this were the case, as I suggested the entire library of thumbs need not be cached all the time. there could be some type of rolling buffer that would say keep the previous and next 15 pages worth of thumbs in memory. As I scroll through the list Sage would be loading those thumbs, but it would (theoretically) never get to the point where I see a page where the images aren't preloaded. once i navigate away from that page, dump the cache.

If Im missing something elemental please feel free to educate me.

Thanks again for listening to us,
Nick

[skyeclad]

Nick,

I know I don't have a lot of technical knowledge about graphics and memory but I have to agree with you. The thumbnail loading speed issue does make the video/music browser feel sluggish and unprepared in a way. Right now the delay is really annoying as I tend to browse both by text and images. All I get now is scrolling placeholder graphics until I stop and count 1, 2, 3 and then the thumbnails begin to appear.

I'm going to reduce the delay but it would be very nice if some of the images were loaded to RAM in the background. Perhaps the SageTV RAM budget is very small? Meaning, you want the program to run on 128MB of ram with 256MB being recommended. Perhaps increased scalability can accommodate those with 2GB+ systems?

Either way, love the software Narflex and although this is off-topic, I would be very interested in seeing some form of ad-supported online content access in some future version of Sage. I'm thinking a SageTV/Hulu.com partnership would be HOT.

[garmpe]

I've got to agree that caching would make sense. I moved over from Meedio where I could scroll through my music library of well over 3000 albums with no delay whatsoever. I love sage but I miss the speed of meedio.

[gibsonpa]

I changed the timing to 100ms and it works very well when running Sage on the PC...however my HD100's still are slow to load the thumbnails. Does the 100ms setting not work on the HD100's....or am I missing a step? Anyone have the thumbnails loading fast on an HD100? I made the 100ms change to each HD100 by the way...and see that new setting in the property file for each HD100 on the server.

[gibsonpa]

Anyone get thumbnails faster on an HD100?

[sakker]

Everytime I upgrade to try out a new beta or rc I am glad that I backed up the 6_3_10 version since it doesn't have this "feature".

It may make perfect programming sense why it is done this way, but for Pete's sake, and no I don't know who Pete is or why I care about his feelings, have someone who just wants to watch a video look at the UI now and you will get a response similar to "ugh, why is it so slow?" or any version of the same.

I won't pretend to know what has to be accomplished to display thumbnails, but I will pretend to know that this is not a good feature that should be left in Sage if you intend word of mouth to help spread the program.

edit to add - I am referring to HD100 viewing, I don't know about PC viewing.

[Shield]

Originally Posted by sakker

Everytime I upgrade to try out a new beta or rc I am glad that I backed up the 6_3_10 version since it doesn't have this "feature".

It may make perfect programming sense why it is done this way, but for Pete's sake, and no I don't know who Pete is or why I care about his feelings, have someone who just wants to watch a video look at the UI now and you will get a response similar to "ugh, why is it so slow?" or any version of the same.

I won't pretend to know what has to be accomplished to display thumbnails, but I will pretend to know that this is not a good feature that should be left in Sage if you intend word of mouth to help spread the program.

edit to add - I am referring to HD100 viewing, I don't know about PC viewing.

I too thought 6.3.10 was the best Sage version to date....Now that I've ditched the problematic HD PVR, I'm seriously considering rolling back to 6.3.10...