NPVR addon slow startup?

[reven]

sorry if this has been mentioned, did a quick search for "slow" but didnt find anything.

ive tried on several clients/platforms
- raspberrypi with raspbmc rc5
- normal pc running openelec
- windows 7

on all of these clients it takes a long time for the PVR addon to start, it has that loading message in the top right corner. seems to take about 30 seconds or more.

when using 4tr this takes a couple of seconds.

can something be done to improve this? when you need to reboot your computer because of experimental xbmc releases, and you're in the middle of a show, you tend to miss quite a bit with this extra delay.

thought it might be IIS compiling/loading the DLLs into memory... sometimes that can take a while...

[sub]

I have certainly noticed xbmc being slow to load. I'm not sure it's related to the nextpvr addon though. XBMC seems to be less than optimized, and queries all sorts of group and channel info at startup, and its pretty slow. It probably doesn't help that NextPVR delivers that info as xml, which will mean some extra parsing time on the client, but this wont add up to anything too significant.

What messages are taking the most time in the top right?

thought it might be IIS compiling/loading the DLLs into memory... sometimes that can take a while...

No, I dont think it's in there anywhere. NextPVR responds to requests from the xbmc addon usually within milliseconds.

I do remember seeing a couple of posts on the xbmc forums recently suggesting changes to xbmc developer to speed up the channel loading at startup, so I dont think it's solely a nextpvr addon issue.

[sub]

Can you post your xbmc.log? I'll check how long the channel loading stage is taking.

[reven]

its during the initial loading pvr addon message, once it gets to the loading channels its fairly quick.

sorry i cant remember off the top of my head ill investigate further tonight and post some logs.

all up nextpvr takes about 1 minute or so to have live tv completely loaded for me, whereas 4tr was ready in about 10 seconds.

just been reading xbmc forums, this may be a problem inside xbmc itself, seems some changes to the API might be the cause, ill try 4tr on the same build and share results.

[reven]

out of curiosity what are you using to open up the api requests? wcf? iis? another webserver? and could you change that to respond in json? (would make the epg data a lot smaller and help on low end clients like the pis with limited memory)

[sub]

out of curiosity what are you using to open up the api requests? wcf? iis? another webserver?

It's using the built in web server. That web server uses the .NET hosting classes for processing ASP.NET for the build in ASP.NET based NEWA. This stuff doesn't going into those classes though, and is handled directly by classes that hook certain URL requests.

and could you change that to respond in json?

To be honest, I probably wont. The interface that I'm using from the addon (which returns xml) already exists for another purpose, and needs to stay xml. I could create a json set of interfaces that lives alongside it, but I dont think it'd worth the effort. It'd be marginally faster, and marginally less memory, but would mean double maintainence for me.

I dont think this significant factor in how long it's taking to load for you. If you post the xbmc.log then I should be able to check where the time is going.

[reven]

ok, thought it might be as simple as adding a method attribute or endpoint for json, .net stuff usually makes supporting xml and json pretty easy together.

[sub]

its during the initial loading pvr addon message, once it gets to the loading channels its fairly quick.

sorry i cant remember off the top of my head ill investigate further tonight and post some logs.

You'll need to check. I dont remember seeing any message about loading the addon. Mine goes straight to 'loading channels from clients' then wastes a fair bit of time querying channel groups and memberships for each group, and deleting and recreating the channel groups in the xbmc database, then after that is very quick to load the EPG (after the the first run which needs to pull in everything).

[sub]

ok, thought it might be as simple as adding a method attribute or endpoint for json, .net stuff usually makes supporting xml and json pretty easy together.

Nope.

[JP23]

Not sure if this is of any help, but I've also been using the VU+ addon with my Dreambox, and it has the following optional feature, which could potentially speed things up:

Folder for channeldata: Retrieving the channel data from the backend can take quite long. To avoid that the user has to wait a long time before the addon starts it stores the information about the available channels in a separate XML file. Instead of quering the backend the addon then tries to load the channels from this XML file during addon startup. This property defines into which directory this XML file will be put. The filename is "channeldata.xml"