Roms on a 8TB drive hooked up to Fritzbox takes ages to load

[MoggFanatic]

I pluged a  8 TB Drive on my Fritzbox as a NAS. Speed is great and browsing files is fast in windows.

Gameex sadly takes ages (2 min) to load the screen where i can start the game when i selct a game from the wheel. once on the info page the game and select the rom the game starts fast. also when going into favorites it take very long before i can see them (20 sec). when disabling the NAS the favorites load fast as normal. i do have some games from the NAS as favorites.

Anyone experiencing similar slowdowns with a NAS drive? How can i avoid this?

Thanks

GameEx.ini log.txt

[Draco1962]

I have not heard of any issues with a NAS and have no way to test. I have used various external drives via USB connections to my data and have had no noticeable lag associated.

Could it possibly be theme related? I would suggest upgrading to the latest version of GameEx (at 18.01 now) and perhaps uploading your theme (the community could benefit from the share as well!).

Also, I am assuming this is with ALL games/emulators?

[Draco1962]

I am assuming you are using the Fritz!box NAS capability on the router/gateway itself and not a standalone NAS. If so, have you tried plugging the 8TB drive directly to yoiur gaming rig to remove the NAS out of the equation to see if you have the same lag? Yeah, you would have to redirect the drive letter in one or more of your emulators to test but it is the only way to know with certainty IMO.

[MoggFanatic]

Thank you Draco1962 for your replies. I did change the themes from my custom one to standard without luck. I also plugged the 8 TB My Book to my Synology 325 NAS. The delay was halfed but still unbearable. My GameEx is updated to the current one without a differnce. I can not plug the My Book directly to my Emulation PC because its somehow not recognised by my USB 3 card.  Instead I bought a 14 TB internal drive to have also more space in the future.

Thanks for your efforts.

 

[Draco1962]

Sorry my suggestions didn't bear much fruit, but it did at least show that there is something with the connection to a NAS in between that is less than favorable.

I know that there have been a few that have leveraged using a NAS with success, so it is doable. Just maybe not so well with your configuration.

[MoggFanatic]

Yes it really must have to do with the my book because i did use the internal HDDs of my NAS in the past and it worked pretty well. 

[tthurman]

I pull all of my content off a Synology NAS and never notice any significant latency.  Is your ethernet adapter set for Full Duplex or do you have any way to see what CPU usage on the Fritzbox is looking like when you're pulling data across from the my book?

 

[MoggFanatic]

Full duplex, the Synology Nas is connected to a switch which is connected to my PC. I haven't looked at the CPU usage of my Nas when gameex is using the 8 TB mybook. I definitely look into it before I switch to the big hard drive  out of curiosity and report back.

[Draco1962]

Assuming USB 3.0 it has a maximum bandwidth rate of 5 gbps although in practical use less. That said, assuming also that you are connected to the NAS via Gigabit Ethernet, your max possible is going to be 1 GbS. Then, let's go down the rabbit hole of the connections themselves and the latency for USB vs. SATA vs. PCI/PCI-E connections. Even though USB 3.0 is comprable in raw speed to SATA (6 GbS), latency on USB can be terrible in comparison, especially when read/writes for smaller files.

Ok that is enough to get my head spinning before my second cup of coffee.

[tthurman]

This may be more of an exercise than anything, but did you try updating again?

[MoggFanatic]

I will try the new update, thanks for letting me know. I will report back soon.

[Tom Speirs]

GameEx is very optimized for network storage. The log you provided does not show you launching a game?

I suspect the file is getting unarchived which may be the delay.

[MoggFanatic]

I did the update to the new version of Gameex but it did not lower the loading speed of the infopage.

launching a game is pretty fast from the NAS even with archived PS2 games with 2 GB in size.

its all about the infopage, the page after selecting a game in the wheel. its only slow with the titles stored on the 8TB USB3 connected to the NAS.

When i select a game in the wheel the following processes occure in my NAS: kworker/u2:2 with 18% cpu load and smbd with 35% load on the cpu until the infopage appears after 30 seconds.

Thanks to all of you for trying to help me. I have the 14 TB drive in front of me and will start the migration process after this post. Whish me luck!

 

[Draco1962]

Best of luck! Let us know how you do!

[MoggFanatic]

I did a sector copy, a clone of my 4 tb because 600000 files would have taken aprox 6 days to copy. Afterwards I expandet the partition copied the other 8 tb and plugge it into my arcade. My BIOS had major problems detecing the new 14tb drive. I spend many hours and after a special constellation of plugging in and out the sata and other plugs it finally works. I was already looking for a upgrade pc but now i am happy and maybe next year i will upgrade in new hardware.

So long, thanks for all the help!