Retropie super slow

[spy64]

Hey guys,

So I recently started over and imaged a 64GB class 10 UHS 1 card with the new Retropie 3.0 Beta for My Pi2. The good news, controller config issues I was having are now magically gone. The pain point for this topic is that everything seems to be super slow after scraping. The games that will actually launch are fine after they launch, but the time between selecting a game and it launching is very long. Another example, when you first boot, the Emulation Station splash screen takes realistically about 10 minutes to get past.

Now, I might already know what my downfall is, but I would like some feedback/input. I thought, “ok i got this 64gb card, this is going to be awesome, I’m going to put everything possible on it”. So I found complete rom sets for every console I could. I have over 20,000 games loaded and I have over 20gb free on the card still.

Scraping using the Pi was unrealistic, it would have never finished, so after prepping and sorting my collections I used a 3rd party scraper script and ran it using powershell, and placed all of the images and gamelist.xml files on the Pi using FTP. Few hundred megs for each set of images, and the gamelist xml for each system is in the ballpark of about 14mb.

I am suspicious that ES is trying to load each gamelist and folder of images completely at boot in stead of retrieving the informatrion as needed and its taking a huge chunk of ram and keeping it loaded, causing my issue. Does this sound on par, or do you guys have any other ideas as to what might be causing it?

Any recoomendations on game library size maximums if this could be the issue?

[herbfargus]

What you are explaining sounds accurate- the bottleneck here is emulation station and the gamelist.XML. quite frankly having that many games is kind of ridiculous- for that type of approach you’re probably better off in the hyperspin forums- its more of a PC compatible method if you are trying to stuff every possible game ever created onto one system. If you want the pi to be manageable- its probably a little more realistic to sort through your massive romsets and delete all the clones, duplicates, nonworking ROMs, and maybe stick to the games you’ll regularly play, or you can have your repository of ROMs on your PC and swap out the games you want to play as you see fit. In short the pi just can’t handle that many ROMs.

[spy64]

gotcha. I think i will probably just have to swap in and out one system at a time. the ROMS I have are all verified working, original releases. No duplicates (unless you count other languages) or hacks.

Too bad ES cant just retrieve info as needed though, seems ineffiecent to have it load images and gamelists this way. Would likely solve the issue entirely.

[herbfargus]

I would have to agree. It has been a point of discussion on the emulationstation github for quite some time along with issues of a similar type. https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/191

For my system I’ve just picked all my favourite games for each system and have an ideal build for that and then when I get bored of them i’ll look in my repository for new games to add. I have emulationstation set up on my laptop for testing the games out before I decide whether or not they are worth playing on my raspberry pi.

[mavic19]

20,000 games!? Wow…that’s unreal. I agree with herbfargus, you might want to cut back a bit. lol. I have roughly 1300 games combined on my system and it is fast as heck. Since I’m running my system within an arcade cab I built, I limited my games to only those systems compatible with single stick and 6 button configurations. Then I made a list of the games that I would most enjoy playing and culling titles out of “Top 100” lists. Even with 1300, that’s an extreme amount of games that I’ll probably not have the time to play in a year. I’m still sorting and refining but I doubt I’ll put more than 1500 total for the sake of making the system somewhat easy for users to navigate and find titles as well as keep from congesting my microSD card.

[spy64]

really it was just a fun project to see how far I can take it… and apparently I found out that im already too far. ;-p

Good thing I stopped to check it out when i did because I have only hit about 18 consoles out of the what? 30 ish it supports? so far… Gotta troubleshoot some I’ve loaded up already still to figure out what I need to do differently to make them work right… but originally the plan was to fully populate every system it supported with full complete romsets. I was just about to start on MAME. So new plan now… gonna cut it down to the favorites…. maybe someday when I’m feeling ambitious I’ll make an one SD card for each system.

Now I gotta find a way to repurpose my 64gb card in a way where it can be utilized more fully. ;-p

[spy64]

thanks for the link! that pretty much is exactly what I was thinking and expirencing!

[quote=96600]<p abp=”319″>I would have to agree. It has been a point of discussion on the emulationstation github for quite some time along with issues of a similar type. https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/191

<p abp=”321″>For my system I’ve just picked all my favourite games for each system and have an ideal build for that and then when I get bored of them i’ll look in my repository for new games to add. I have emulationstation set up on my laptop for testing the games out before I decide whether or not they are worth playing on my raspberry pi.

[/quote]

[cacophony555]

FWIW, I have about 4000 roms spread across 6 systems with everything scraped and don’t see any major performance issues on my Pi 2. Emulationstation loads in about 10 seconds and I can launch/quit games within a couple seconds.

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