Startup slow

Movies Movie Collector
1

Is there any way to speedup movie collector’s start up. For me, it takes about 40 seconds to startup.

2

I am sorry to hear you are running into performance problems with our Windows software.

In the past we have seen 3 main causes for slowness like this.
Here’s they are (with solutions), most likely first:

  1. The program may be trying to initialize a barcode scanner at startup, but failing because the scanner is not present. Have you in the past maybe used a barcode scanner, e.g. the OPN-2001 or the Flic scanner?
    To solve this, you would need to remove that “Initialize scanner at startup” setting from the registry manually.
    Here’s how:
  • make sure Movie Collector is not running
  • open the Windows Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
  • navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Collectorz.com\Movie\Settings
  • there, remove the “Automatically Activate Flic” entry (just delete it)
  • close RegEdit
  • Restart Movie Collector

  1. A firewall may be blocking the program’s internet access, but not in the right way. A firewall that blocks access should result in an instant “access denied”, but we’ve seen some firewalls somehow hanging up the internet request, causing slowness.
    Can you check your firewall software to see if our software is allowed to access the internet? Maybe completely remove the rule for your Collector program, then re-add it?

  2. We’ve seen rare cases where the new skins (Dark and Light) are causing the program to be slow, maybe because of an unusual display setting or driver.
    To resolve this, try switching to the System skin, through the View menu, then Skins, then System.

3

I tried all these with no improvement and then ran an experiment of my own. I have a very large collection and I was suspicious that loading the database at startup might be the cause. I opened the example database, closed Movie collector, then reopened Movie collector. It took about 2.5 seconds to open. So this issue in my case is related to the size of the database. Maybe in some future revision, you can figure out how to load the database as a background task and not slow down the startup.

4

How large is your database? How many movies?

5

6000+

6

Another possible way to speed it up is use multiple cores/threads. This depends on the bottleneck. If the bottleneck is the reading off the hard drive, then this won’t help.

7

Sorry, but 6000 is not a large database. The program should still start up in seconds.

The bottleneck is not likely to be processor power. This is probably related to disk or network access.

  • Are you maybe opening the database file from an external drive?
  • Are the cover images stored on external drive maybe?
  • Are your cover images very very large files maybe?
8

Yes, this is very possibly the reason. I store the database and image files on a NAS. I keep them there because it is a RAID and has some protection of the data. The images folder is 1.33 GB. Thumbnails folder is 415 MB. I do run the delete orphaned images tool once in awhile.