Performance Emby WMC vs Emby Theatre vs MB2.6

[throgmorton 96]

I've spend the long weekend here migrating over and setting up my Emby implementation and its possible I haven't configured everything properly but there were a few performance issues I noticed on how things behave.

 

Under Emby WMC there seems to be a performance hit that I've noticed on load and there is a delay between the Welcome to Emby message and the Emby is up to date message.  Once I see the Emby is up to date message everything is super fast and responsive.  However if I were to enter lets say my movies directory prior to receiving the Emby is up to date message although the poster and metadata seem to load the list is completely out of order.  It's only after the up to date message displays the list reorders itself.  Essentially after receiving the Emby is up-to-date everything is snappy and working as I would expect, however prior to this lists aren't populated or are out of order.

 

Under MB 2.6 this behaviour is quite different as everything was instantly loaded (I think based on the last state), However things like new titles weren't populated right away in order to accomplish this fast load, and this process was pushed to a background thread and within lets say like 30 seconds or so depending on the size of collection this background process would finish and the lists were refreshed.

 

Under Emby Theatre this load delay seems to be pushed to the point where the user selects the folder of interest like "all movies" or "all series" where a noticeable delay maybe 3 to 5 seconds depending on collection size takes place while it gathers the list of titles. 

 

So my first question is I'm right on the behaviour? Is this how things are suppose to work or have I fouled something up?

 

If I'm right on the behaviour wouldn't the MB 2.6 method be preferable?  I mean I like everything being snappy and loaded instantly right away and have a background process gather up any changes to the contents and update the lists as necessary. 

[ebr 16183]

I think in most instances Emby is just as fast if not faster as the old system with a ton more functionality.

 

However, exactly what you are asking for isn't really practical in the Emby world because it is now a true client/server architecture.  With MB 2.6 everything was self-contained so some things may have appeared slightly faster.  But there was no access to your information from anywhere other than within WMC.

 

In the new world, your app is getting information from the server for all of its display as opposed to having the entire library loaded in memory on the same machine.

 

A final complication is that EMC is really just MB 2.6 re-wired to talk to the server.  We've done most of what we can to make this work well but the basic architecture of EMC and its displays don't always lend themselves to a true client-server situation.  So, specifically with EMC, some things will just never be able to perform as they should given that design.

[throgmorton 96]

For the most part I agree with you Emby is as fast if not faster in every aspect I have tested with the exception of the initial load, that is the only real difference I've seen in the testing I've done.  I initially thought maybe it was the fact that in MB2.6 the cache.db was local to the machine and in this new client-server relationship maybe pulling that amount of information over the network was slowing things down (as I believe all of this information is now stored in the library.db on the server).  Although running Emby WMC on the same machine as the server didn't really show any improvement to load times.  The one advantage that I currently see with Emby WMC as opposed to Emby Theatre is that once this load is done your good for the session (its just a minor annoyance that I have to wait 4 or 5 seconds for this process to complete).  Jump in and out of directories within Emby WMC has no issues while every time in Theatre I jump into a large folder there is a delay while it loads the contents.  Probably has something to do with Theatre not storing it all in memory or something the way WMC does.

[Luke 42078]

We are just in a long state of transition, gradually moving from one way of doing things to another, and it's something that's happening over a period of many releases. We will come out of it leaner and faster than ever before, and nothing you've ever done with Media Browser or Emby will be as fast as it's going to be. But until that's completed there are still many areas using older methods and those are the areas where you might see some degraded performance.

[throgmorton 96]

Oh I don't doubt that over time these things will become faster, it just what I have noticed in the current state.  I was just surprised that everything else seem fast just the initial load into WMC which I found odd as I thought in both cases it was being read from an SQLite database so I wouldn't have thought there would be really any difference.