Speeding up Media Portal Boot (1 Viewer)

[Scythe42]

Regarding startup time - @Scythe42 - words of wisdom?

Plugins are the main problem. They can be loaded/started while MP already shows basic home. If you select a window, which uses a certain plugin the contents are only shown when the plugin is ready. Need to check it in detail where it has side effects. Initial tests have shown that it might work this way with current master.

Probably some additional checks or a general "Loading XML" would help greatly (darken current window/element, overlay with a Loading Animation like the Wait Cursor or just the part where it is showing its contents) is needed if a plugin could cause problems. Need to test in detail. No change to Skins needed. MP should handle this.

This can be done without changing the plugin architecture. Even though there is huge potential doing some overhaul here in the way MP handles them.

But on my current test builds with MP out of the Box and the following Plugins:

• Fanart Handler
• Latest Media Handler
• Moving Pictures
• TV Series
• My Films
• Online Videos
• Power Scheduler++
• Sub Central
• Trakt
• Info Service
• IMDB+
• Fritz Box Manager
• Browse the web
• Event Ghost Plus
• Weather Thingy by Micropolis (forgot the exact Name)

I have a startup time of a few seconds on a four year old machine. A bit slower than XBMC though. Splash-Screen stays active in the background for a couple of seconds still show initialising stuff while MP is already there (as it is not D3D, which the rest is). Tested with StreamedMP, Default/Default Wide and of course Titan.

In addition the general delayed loading of some resources should be changed to background loading. This will make MP feel a bit snappier. This will happen with a replacement of the TextureManger/FontEngine.

Also this stuff should stay in memory. We are talking 4MB compared to 16MB on DefaultWide for example. No need to conserve GPU memory here. We hardly use any and the skins are still small anyway. There is no noteworthy difference in startup time by loading all GFX stuff directly. But as said: delayed loading should be switched to background loading.

Not loading/disposing stuff on demand helps a lot in general. It should make even TV Zapping a bit faster as well (there are some Load()/Dispose() involved if I am not mistaken). We have way too many plugins/windows defined as "delayed loading" anyway or freeing up there resources all the time and re-allocating them later.

Also Input Devices seems to cause some problems. There are some checks involved depending on what you activated that cause additional delay until it runs in a timeout. Haven't figured out which ones yet.

 

[Scythe42]

Also similar to Office Quickstart we can keep parts of MP in memory until a restart as long as there is free memory or already loading some stuff to memory before MP is even started.. Starting with Vista (read Kernel 6.x) there are options for this (even without a Quickstart feature). The system uses free memory to cache applications and their resources.

Currently this doesn't work with MP as we are always disposing stuff (to be on the same side) before re-loading it. Better state tracking of what is allocated and what not could help here out of the box on subsequent restarts without re-booting the system. This would be GuiWindowManager.cs if I am not mistaken.

But need to read up on MSDN if there are some special requirements when allocating resources to leverage Kernel 6.x stuff.

All in all this is a great feature of Kernel 6.x that free memory is not wasted. Only when another application requests memory this "system cache" is freed up. But users still look on free memory too much.

The Application Caching wasn't really marketed by MS with Vista. So users still use "Memory Free/Cleanup" tools. Yeah, gives you more free memory that does nothing and makes the system less snappier on subsequent reuses of Apps when you don't shut it down (using hibernation since ages). OSX users know this for about a decade now.

Anyway, I'll dig a bit into MSDN ans see what we can do out of the box in general to be less "XP legacy" on modern systems.