Program Loading Please Wait, and wait and wait (has it hung?)

Hi,

Media companion can take quite a while to startup with my movies on a USB attached drive let alone when it reads off a file share over the network.

Could it please say what its doing (Loading movie #56 from c:\fefefef\ddd\wherever) or similar so we can see progress and guess how far from completion it is. It would be nice to have the version number on that page also..

Thanks
Dennis

Yes it does take a while to load, I'm just wondering if there is a quicker way to get the data loaded.....

At the moment the way i see it......
Data is read in from each nfo & populates the fields in memory - often relies on network speed for remote files
As new nfo's are added, the nfo's are created & the fields in memory are updated
On exit, nothing has to be done as everything is updated in real time.

A faster way....
Load the previous state of the fields in memory...either one big xml or some sort of data file that will be fast to load
As new files are added, nfo's are created, the data file is updated, fields in memory are updated.
On exit, nothing has to be done...(Another option here is to utilise a 'save changes' type of operation, i.e. on exit we save changed nfo's, changed data in the data file etc which may make editing mutilple files using the program quicker...)

I current have 1100 TV episodes, & it is painful to load, even when I know I'm not adding new data.....

Thanks

StormyKnight wrote:

A faster way....
Load the previous state of the fields in memory...either one big xml or some sort of data file that will be fast to load
As new files are added, nfo's are created, the data file is updated, fields in memory are updated.
On exit, nothing has to be done...(Another option here is to utilise a 'save changes' type of operation, i.e. on exit we save changed nfo's, changed data in the data file etc which may make editing mutilple files using the program quicker...)

I current have 1100 TV episodes, & it is painful to load, even when I know I'm not adding new data.....

Thanks

I think it should cache but I'd want some control over this as I use multiple configuration files to simulate the misisng "profiles".

UPDATE....
89 Movies, 1114 TV Episodes on NAS unit using 100Mbit startup time 2mins 05 seconds.


Perhaps when the TV part of the program is looked at perhaps some inspection of the current time intensive parts can be looked at.
Even at the current loading rate, its only a tenth of a second per episode....so I don't know if that is easily improved...

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

UPDATE....
89 Movies, 1114 TV Episodes on NAS unit using 100Mbit startup time 2mins 05 seconds.


Perhaps when the TV part of the program is looked at perhaps some inspection of the current time intensive parts can be looked at.
Even at the current loading rate, its only a tenth of a second per episode....so I don't know if that is easily improved...

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Cheers

Just for the sake of comparison, I have 218 movies and 1094 TV episodes and it takes 21 seconds to load. My movies/TV are stored on a QNAP 509 Pro NAS (5 WD Green 1TB drives) connected via CAT6 to my 4GB XP Pro Quad Core computer.

I'm not sure if it matters, but my "startup mode" is set to movies.

[quote="SirBC"]

StormyKnight wrote:

Just for the sake of comparison, I have 218 movies and 1094 TV episodes and it takes 21 seconds to load. My movies/TV are stored on a QNAP 509 Pro NAS (5 WD Green 1TB drives) connected via CAT6 to my 4GB XP Pro Quad Core computer.

I'd just like to make my opinion clear, while there is no one on this planet who wouldn't like things faster, I think its much more important that you can verify that something is progressing. In the case of my wife and daughter it would also double as a WiFi strength meter, faster progress = better reception :-)

Bye,
Dennis

I'll look into adding some kind of progress indicator.

Just an update on my progress on this.

I haven't been able to create any loading progress indicator, I see a way to do it, but the code just isn't set up right and it would take a lot of work.

On the other hand. to address the loading time issue I have created a cache xml file that captures the data loaded when the program quits. In my tests this greatly reduces load time.
The sort of figures I am getting are as follows using media stored on a 2TB GigaNAS, containing 1279 movies and and 1408 TV Episodes spread over 17 TV Shows

Loading without cache file
40 seconds

Loading with cache file
15 seconds

My PC is an old AMD X2 4200 skt 739
2GB DDR 400Mhz

This should make an even much bigger difference for people using slow NAS devices accross a slow network

@dbareis
Just for you, I've added support for profiles. It is pretty basic at the moment but once a profile has been created it has its own config and cache file. They can be added and removed from the preferences.
I have added a dropdown menu to the main menubar for selection for those who have more than one profile.

btw, if you are wondering about all the extra files that are suddenly going to be messing up your MC folder then don't. When running the next version a folder will be created in the users application data directory, all config files will be moved to this folder and new ones will be saved there. This will also stop the issues people have when trying to use MC when its in Program Files on a vista machine.

Thanks Billy I appreciate the efforts on this issue....when comparing with other times I did some investigation with my system....my original test was with a few other apps running, and as you can see I'm a little short on memory to be running mutiple apps, but with just Media Companion the loading time was still just over 1 minute with my NAS unit which is on 100Mbit link. (Note this is eqivalent to 12.5MB/s & some local hard drives are up around 100MB/s these days...)

My System....
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 1GB memory XP SP3
Netgear DuoNas with 2x500GB drives in Raid 1 (1 drive is an exact copy of the other)