Closing (Clicking on OK) Config Takes Forever

[nitrogen_widget]

I get similiar speed issues.
Though not that bad.
It took about 3 mins. for the config app to close & about 3 also for the guide to come up.
Lot's of disk activity.
I went to zap2it & saw that easily 100 new channels appeared for Driectv.
Chanels I will never use & in fact didn't even know existed.
I trimmed things down & it seemed to speed things up.
It took my sql DB from 45 mb to around 27 mb.

I just figured it wasn't the channels themselves but all the guide text with them that has to processed that was causing problems.

[Ted the Penguin]

I think its everything, all of the channels, plus the text for them, plus how many days you have in the EPG, it adds up. also I dont know how sqllite scales, or if there is a memory bottleneck somewhere that when you get over a certain size it will get exponentially slower because it has to cache to disk, or the database becomes inefficient when over some size, so every single operation takes longer

[sub]

The genre items also have a big impact on how long things take. There is often several of these per show. With 577 odd channels, 13 days of listings, its often inserting quarter of million listings (assuming about 30 shows per day per channel), and over half a million genre items. Thats quite a bit of data, and because the EPG needs to be able to accommodate the situation where data already exists (ie, subsequent EPG updates), it needs to check for the existance of certain items before deciding if it needs to insert or update existing ones. This is a big factor.

[Echoloc8]

Well, trimming my DirecTV channels from 600ish (including locals) down to around 120 seems to have done the trick, for both issues!

Saving and exiting config.exe is now down to around 10 seconds, and the wait for the first access of the TV Guide screen in the GUI is down to around 45 seconds, which is acceptable, since I'll be leaving the GUI up all the time.

Thanks muchly for all the help! I will be interested to see if better scaling with SQLite becomes possible with time, though I do understand the massive amounts of data involved (I'm a database/intranet programmer in my day job).

-Rich

[Ted the Penguin]

it needs to check for the existance of certain items before deciding if it needs to insert or update existing ones.

HAHA THERE is where it becomes exponential

[sub]

Yes exactly. There are some more complex schemes I could use to avoid this occuring, but for the majority of users the existing approach works just fine. Its only a problem for that small percentage of users that are in the US with a phenominally large number of channels. I'd guess the vast majority of users have less than a hundred channels - most a lots less.

[sub]

Sorry, I drifted back to saving the EPG again... I forgot we were discussing loading the tv guide.

[sub]

Saving and exiting config.exe is now down to around 10 seconds, and the wait for the first access of the TV Guide screen in the GUI is down to around 45 seconds, which is acceptable, since I'll be leaving the GUI up all the time.

Its worth noting, that this delay is only seen if the first thing you do after start GB-PVR is switch to the TV Guide. If you'd been doing others first (live tv, viewing recordings etc), then the TV Guide will give you zero delay the first time you access it, since the background load would have completed by then.

[Echoloc8]

FWIW, it makes complete sense that saving the entire EPG would take a large amount of time: it's loads and loads of information.

I hadn't realized that genre info caused so many problems, though: all the more impressive that Zap2it makes their guide data available free for personal use.

-Rich

[Echoloc8]

Its worth noting, that this delay is only seen if the first thing you do after start GB-PVR is switch to the TV Guide. If you'd been doing others first (live tv, viewing recordings etc), then the TV Guide will give you zero delay the first time you access it, since the background load would have completed by then.

Very true, and that's a welcome feature. My getting-started experience has been distorting my perception, I think, because I've been doing all my testing without a real collection of recordings, which means the only way to test video was to hit Live TV or the TV Guide, both of which depend (Live TV seemingly less so, for channel-changing) on having guide data loaded.

During normal use I'll be hitting recordings first thing, of course, allowing the TV Guide data to background-load with no fuss.

-Rich