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TV Pages slow to load on all apps - Guide too big?


jachin99

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jachin99

I'm using HD Homerun Primes with SD guide data.  I believe the data emby gets from SD includes about one hundred or so channels, and I might have an option to construct an xmltv file to slim down my guide data.  The live TV page loads slow in the web app, and on the XB1 ET app.  Is this normal and is there something I can do to speed things up.  For starters I have configured emby to only download 2 days of guide.  Is there anything else.

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jachin99

Probably about 200.  Even if I could cut out the SD channels it seems like it would help because I don't watch those anyway. 

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jachin99

I didn't see any options to disable channels in emby so I went to my schedules direct page, and cut out some of my channels i dont use.  After doing this, I would still get about a hundred or more channels in emby I don't use.  So i went to my HDHR Prime's web page, and disabled most of the channels I don't watch.  After doing this, most of the pages in the Live TV section of the EWA load much quicker.  The guide is still a little slow, and there is about a five or ten second delay between I select a channel and when it plays but things have improved.  

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  • 10 months later...
Droyd01

I'm having the same problem.  I have about 250 channels. I am using the Shield version with m3u and XML.  When I go to TV guide it takes 20-30 seconds to load up.  Isn't it downloaded and cashed?

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I'm having the same problem.  I have about 250 channels. I am using the Shield version with m3u and XML.  When I go to TV guide it takes 20-30 seconds to load up.  Isn't it downloaded and cashed?

 

My Shield with a couple thousand channels (but not 100% with guide data) only takes a few seconds to load.  We may need to look at specifics of your setup.

 

Thanks.

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I'm running the server on a Windows PC on a home network, not the shield.  Would that make a difference?

 

My server is not on the Shield either.  It is tough to say without seeing a specific example.

 

We can start by taking a look at a server log from when you bring up the guide on the Shield.

 

Thanks.

 

How to Report a Problem

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I've got about 1500 channels setup with EPG info and it does take too long to load.  It's just as bad in the web interface.

 

On Shield TV the guide takes 10 to 12 seconds to load for me typically.

 

If this could dynamically load in pages to get the first screen populated it would be far better and more user friendly.

 

At least this way we could FAVORITE or use the SORT FIELD to put our important channels at the top.  Most of the channels I use all the time are on the first or second page as I've used the sort field to put them there.  This page has my ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MyTV, Fox News, CW type channels.

 

I don't know how others use the guide but I normally don't scroll around in it looking for stuff to watch.  I search for shows to record, set them up then forget about them.  Use Programs/Movies to check what movies are on in the next 24 to 48 hours.

 

I do use the grid with my locals I mentioned earlier for sports, local news and programming but don't normally need to venture further down the grid that often.  If the first page or two could get loaded quickly then build up the rest it would seem to work a lot faster.  Basically some paging in this section would go a long way.  The more channels with full EPG the more help it would be.

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If this could dynamically load in pages to get the first screen populated it would be far better and more user friendly.

 

The Shield app already does a two-stage load.  Grabbing the 15 channels surrounding the first one to be displayed first and then getting the rest in the background.

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Any idea why it's still so slow then?

 

Not without seeing some actual examples (logs) :).

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  • 2 weeks later...
appoli

Hi All,

 

I have some users that have started to use the live tv functionality since the good people at Emby have added that functionality to the Apple TV app. The guide has always been pretty slow to load regardless of the platform being used. I've tried web browser, iOS app, and appletv app I believe to go through the live tv listings. Earlier this month I was at the home of someone who uses my server and I was showing them the live tv feature on their Apple TV and when we went to the guide it loaded for a while (over a minute) then conked out - the individual channels loaded relatively quickly. Using their WiFi I was then able to load up the guide on my phone, however the internet down there is pretty bad when visiting sites not hosted by the ISP which explains a good chunk of the slow loading.

 

But as I said before, the guide takes a fair amount of time to load even when I'm on the same local network. I mapped a few missing channels, re-downloaded the EPG, & found a series to record less than 30 minutes ago - with all that data cached the guide still took just under 10 seconds to load (the 'Programs' menu takes 2-3 seconds. When going from one submenu and then back the Programs menu loads instantly, the Guide lags for about 2 seconds with nothing happening and then the page refreshes with the Guide). This is being on the same LAN as the server.

 

As others have mentioned there is probably quite a bit of data that needs to be sent around with the EPG so some lag is totally understandable IMO. That being said I'm also curious as to what resource is the bottleneck when the loading up the guide - looking at the server stats the cpu is barely used, plenty of ram free in the server & LXC container (also it's ZFS so I would expect the data to still be in the ARC when I circled back to the guide to time the wait), there was little network traffic (which makes the experience I had at the users house curious), & not much disk IO (there was a fair chunk when the EPG was updating).

 

So with all that said, I wonder where the weak link is?

As it sounded like some logs were requested I'll throw mine into the ring. I'm not including the log from when the Apple TV timed out b/c I don't remember what day it was, but within the last 24 hours I have gone through the guide a few times on different devices.

 

Appreciate the help & let me know if any other info would be helpful

-Allen

embyserver.txt

embyserver-63689729918.txt

hardware_detection-63689730110.txt

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In most instances the issue is the sheer amount of data that has to be "packaged up" sent across the wire and then "unpackaged" and processed for display.  When you have 12 hours of programs on hundreds of channels that is a lot of data.  Some of the apps are using some fast loading techniques (load the first visible channels only and then go get the rest in the background) to make the initial display faster and we are constantly working on making the transfer more efficient as well.

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appoli

Hi ebr,

 

Thanks for the reply :)

 

I figured that's most likely the exact issue, I was just confused since it didn't seem like much data was sent out of the container/server nor was there a lot of I/O or CPU activity so I wasn't sure if it was the amount of data or a combination of things like rendering, etc.

 

Is there anything an end user may do to improve this (e.g. limiting the number of channels, certain types of options that are data heavy, etc. or maybe for more technical users some type of caching)?

 

thanks!

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When you have 12 hours of programs on hundreds of channels that is a lot of data.  Some of the apps are using some fast loading techniques (load the first visible channels only and then go get the rest in the background) to make the initial display faster and we are constantly working on making the transfer more efficient as well.

I was wondering about this.  So you pull back 12 hours of data back for the grid?

Have you tried 4 or 6 hours?

 

I know on my system the way I use the EPG I hardly ever scroll forward in the apps more then a couple of hours.  It's used mostly to find what's playing in a 4 hour block of time.

 

Any chance this could be made an option/config so we can tune it best for how we each use the guide data?

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That's not something that needs to be configurable. It's up to us to keep improving how the apps load the epg data from Emby Server.

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That's not something that needs to be configurable. It's up to us to keep improving how the apps load the epg data from Emby Server.

I complete agree with the "improving the apps" part but how can you possibly know how the data is used on a server without monitoring and adjusting as you go?  By this I mean, for example if loading 12 hours of data at a time then 2/3 of this data will never be used on my system as is just waiting time, network bandwidth and CPU cycles to process data that won't be used.

 

That's why I mentioned it being configurable.  Maybe 4 or 6 hours would be the sweet spot on my system while 8 to 12 hours would be the sweet spot for you or someone else depending on how they use the grid and how many channels they have.

 

Right now the EPG grid is pretty slow loading on my system in all clients and anything that could be done to speed up this process would be great short of not loading some channels.  Being able to change a config option and only have 1/3 the data to deal with seems like it would have a magical speedup for me.

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Can you put a stopwatch on your guide load in Android TV for me?  That app only loads about 10 channels worth of data initially and it comes up in a couple seconds on my Shield.

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It's been a lot faster today.  Don't know if anything changed in 4.1.0.19 server or Android TV 1.7.01g but it's 1 to 1.5 second load time right now.

I'd never have a problem with this at all. :)

 

I did reduce the amount of days I'm loading EPG data from 14 to 7 as well but have no idea how much that may/may not affect things.

Edited by cayars
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appoli

I just tried timing the guide as well for fun. For me it loaded up much faster than usual as well (I think), but there haven’t been any changes.

 

Safari (mobile): 8 to 8.3 seconds

Emby iOS app: 9.45 seconds

 

I’ll try it out a few other times & will use my Apple TV once I get home next week (pretty good internet connection, fairly strong LTE which is actually faster than ‘broadband’ around here). Also, while loading there was a spinning multi-colored circle which I assume indicates more than just waiting on data since that wasn’t present when ‘Programs’ was loading.

 

I did schedule a few things to be DVRed tomorrow/this weekend which is the first time I’ve done that in a year. No idea if this effects anything.

 

To Cayars - I have my EPG set to download 14 days worth.

 

To all - I did have a weird bug with the number of days the EPG downloads. I’ve always had it set to 14 days, but I checked the guide last week and I was only getting 7 or 8. I think it may have been because I upgraded emby to the latest version only a few weeks ago?

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I just happened to go back into the guide right before reading this thread and it was back to normal of somewhere in the 10 second mark.  I think it was cached the other day when I tried it.

 

@@appoli I normally run 14 days as well but have been playing a lot with M3U files and have 8 EPGs setup.  So it makes loading after changes faster with less data.  Once I get done playing I'll likely push it back to 14 days.

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