[Wolferine111]

Hey all,

I have searched around on the forums but haven't really found anything that is similar to what I am experiencing.

Just to set the scene:

My media centre is running Windows 7 Pro SP1 with all the latest updates.
Hardware is a mid 2010 Mac Mini with all apple updates installed.
XBMC 11.0 Eden FINAL

My XBMC media centre connects to a server running Windows 7 Professional also, which hosts a MySQL database that contains the shared database for my entire media collection. This server also houses my Thumbnails folder which is made accessible to the media centre by using a pathsubstitution within the advancedsettings.xml file.

There are several other devices running XBMC that connect to this same server with no issues at all, including an ATV2, an iPad2, and another Mac running OSX Lion.

Now onto my actual problem.

My Windows 7 media centre takes FOREVER (I'm talking maybe 5 minutes) to respond when I select either "Movies" or "TV Shows". This happens in both the default skin Confluence, and also Aeon MQ3. It doesn't matter which view I change either of them to.

I don't consider myself to be a novice when it comes to setting XBMC up, and this issue is driving me insane as I just can't work out what is happening.

I have turned on Debug level 3 logging in advancedsettings.xml and have linked in a pastebin of my log file for while this was happening.

I am hoping someone is able to decrypt what is going on and explain my problem to me. I have noticed that there are some ERROR notes towards the end of the file, but I am unsure if they are related to my issue. Windows Firewall is turned off on the Media Centre, and disabling it on the server also made no difference.

http://pastebin.com/TJfviMeb

[jhsrennie]

I would guess it's something to do with the folder redirection. Try temporarily putting the files back in your local profile and commenting out the redirections in advancedsettings.xml, and see how that affects the speed.

There have been lots of comments that redirected thumbnails are slow, so if I was allowed one guess I'd say that was the offender.

BTW I use a "flat" Mini as well, with Win 7, and I have to say it's the best HTPC I've ever used by a large margin. It's just shame they replaced the 320M graphics with an Intel GPU in the current models.

[Memphiz]

maybe that resolve thingy in mysql configuration might also slow down things ... read about mysql tweaks in our wiki...

[Wolferine111]

I would guess it's something to do with the folder redirection. Try temporarily putting the files back in your local profile and commenting out the redirections in advancedsettings.xml, and see how that affects the speed.

There have been lots of comments that redirected thumbnails are slow, so if I was allowed one guess I'd say that was the offender.

BTW I use a "flat" Mini as well, with Win 7, and I have to say it's the best HTPC I've ever used by a large margin. It's just shame they replaced the 320M graphics with an Intel GPU in the current models.

And with that, problem is FIXED.

Ok so now this creates another issue for me - How should I keep this local version of the thumbnails folder in sync with the centralised one on the server?

I have used a program called DSynchronized - http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

Which seems to work, but it only keeps things in sync that are changed in real-time (so if the MacMini is turned off, nothing is sync'd to it)

I need something similar in functionality to DropBox (as in it keeps things in sync at all times), but preferably something that doesn't require an internet connection (LAN sync only?)

I have intentions of moving to EventGhost as Shell, so I need something that can hopefully be run as a service.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I was also looking into the built-in "Offline Files" functionality from within Windows, but I don't know if this will work once I move to EventGhost as shell.

Thanks all!

[rocketpants]

I believe that dropbox can work in a LAN only environment - or at least to LAN only updates if the PCs are on the same network without having to transfer data over the internet. The problem with dropbox is that is uses the my dropbox folder. You could do a path substitution to the my dropbox folder to get around that issue. There are also a bunch of roll your own dropbox tutorials available if you wan tto investigate that option like this http://lifehacker.com/5657283/how-to-mak...up-service

As an alternative you could use freefilesync. I use freefilesync to sync the local thumbnail directory to the server. I only do it manually when I update the library but you could easily set up a batch command and trigger that if there are changes to a particular directory (i.e. the thumbnail directory). I haven't tried this but assume that it could be set to run on boot.

Not sure how this would sit with using EventGhost though.