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Kelemvor · 2012-11-18, 06:45

Just installed my new Pi with RaspBMC the other day. Everything about it is incredibly slow. I had read that the menu system was slow but it's painfully slow to even scroll through my movies.

When I go from one movie to the next, it takes 10-20 seconds for the new box art and background image to load. Is this normal? Is there anything I can do to fix this as it's pretty unusable right now.

Even when I did a library update, it took hours and hours to go and I only have 300 or so movies. I'm debating using MediaCompanion to do the scraping but am not sure if that would make XBMCs scraping just look to the local folders or how that really works.

Anyway, I'm new to XBMC and to the Raspberry Pi so any help would be great with the slowness of loading the images and things would be great.

Thanks.

~~Ned Scott~~ · 2012-11-18, 06:54

What speed is your SD card? Have you tried OpenELEC or XBian as well? Have you checked out the performance tips on Raspberry Pi FAQ (wiki)?

Kelemvor · (This post was last modified: 2012-11-18, 07:03 by Kelemvor.)

Card is a class 6, 4gig card.

Haven't tried the others. Do they work the same way? Any major difference? Does OpenElec have a nice installed like Rasp? I don't know much about linux so can't install anything by hand.

The performance tips I saw seemed to be based on video playback and I'm not even getting that far.

Dilligaf · (This post was last modified: 2012-11-18, 07:06 by Dilligaf.)

They're all pretty much the same. Initial browsing is slow as that's when the artwork is cached, afterwards it should speed up some, try some overclocking. It's never going to be a replacement for a PC but it makes a decent low power Media Center for the cost of a dinner out.

~~Ned Scott~~ · 2012-11-18, 10:28

Running it from a faster SD card, or even just using the SD card to boot and running XBMC from a USB drive, could speed things up. Sadly I can't test any of this out or help with instructions until my replacement Pi (old one died) gets here in... oh wait, just two days (I've been waiting so long, I thought they'd never come :D )

It sounds like it's unusually slow if it's taking 10-20 seconds to load each image. Make sure Raspbmc is using the 720 GUI settings and not overriding it to 1080 (gui will be rendered in 720, but video will be in 1080 when possible). That can speed things up a lot.

bboo · 2012-11-18, 15:22

I have tried Openelec and XBian and i found the later to be better overall. When you initially set it up though (adding movies,add-ons), you will experience slowness but after that it works very well. I have also disabled fanart and have selected list and mediainfo views for movies and tv shows. This improves the performance even more.

**Sam.Nazarko** · 2012-11-19, 10:34

Use the USB install for Raspbmc and you may see a great increase in performance. You can do this by ticking 'USB' in the Windows installer.

sdsnyr94 · 2012-11-20, 15:50

I have been noticing a similiar issue.

I have tried both Raspbmc on a USB and Openelec, and initially after install the menu system is very responsive.. I can navigate through changing settings and don't really notice that I am on my Pi, as compared to my HTPC.

If I add a couple of videos, things still appear to be quite responsive.... until I add my MYSQL database to advancedsettings. My Movies total about 750 and TV episodes about 1200, and navigating through them is painfully slow.

Is there anything I can either :
1- Optimize MySQL to better support the Pi?
2- Pre-Cache all the artwork on startup.... maybe to a USB drive? I would be willing to wait a few extra minutes for unit to boot if it would help the overall experience with the menus.

opeters · 2012-12-20, 00:10

When using MySQL (Frodo RC1) is indeed very slow for some reason. Using an iOS remote like Constellation or the official XBMC remote is almost impossible. Seems like there are a lot of network connections which slows it down to much. I don't know how it works but it seems like the apps are getting the poster/fanart via the RPi and then the RPi fetches it from the SQL server. On the SQL server there are like 6-10 connections from the RPi several accessing the database ans several in initial login state.

Anyway using SQL isn't working for the RPi, performance wise that is.

sdsnyr94 · 2012-12-20, 00:42

(2012-12-20, 00:10)opeters Wrote: When using MySQL (Frodo RC1) is indeed very slow for some reason. Using an iOS remote like Constellation or the official XBMC remote is almost impossible. Seems like there are a lot of network connections which slows it down to much. I don't know how it works but it seems like the apps are getting the poster/fanart via the RPi and then the RPi fetches it from the SQL server. On the SQL server there are like 6-10 connections from the RPi several accessing the database ans several in initial login state.

Anyway using SQL isn't working for the RPi, performance wise that is.

I think it is because it has to pull in and cache all the posters. If you clear your database, and use the Pi to scrape in everything fresh (this way it has everything cached), it actually is pretty responsive. Not the greatest solution... but worked out for me.

wes paich · 2012-12-20, 03:06

using a class 10 card with raspmc, and i found it to be almost as fast as my pc. (win7 3.2 dual core blah blah) maybe the cards speed is the problem.

andreasz · 2013-09-08, 13:25

http://blog.lux-medien.com/2013/08/raspb...rformance/

- I wrote this a few weeks ago. If anyone is still having some issues.

Only thing I am still fighting with is network performance. I will try rebuilding the driver myself, etc. If that doesn't improve, I will switch to gentoo and lose the entire XBMC feature along with it.