Dear Community / Plex support,
When I go to any folder in plex, lets in this case say my movie folder, it loads thumbnails of the movies that are visible on the screen. On a computer that’s about 44 movies and on my LG TV Plex or PLEX for XBOX one it will be about 16-18 movies on the screen at a time scrolling sideways so lets focus on this.
It of course takes a little time to load all thumbnails of movies on the first page but this should be the last time that you notice thumbnails loading unless e.g. you’re on movies starting with numbers and you skip ahead to display movies starting with K
Reading all movie title names / looking at the posters of all the 16-18 movies on the first page of library before deciding if I want to watch something there or continue to browse through library takes probably at least 5-10 seconds. Time that obviously plex should be spending loading the next couple of pages so there is seamless browsing when I scroll to next page and next page etc.
But it doesn’t!? Which is absolutely moronic, so now every time you scroll to next page there is a little delay for all movies on the next page to load thumbnails and it should be SEAMLESS. To friends who use Plex for the first time and scroll through my libraries, the first comment I almost always get is if i’m on slow hardware/network or if PLEX is a system from 1999 cause that’s what it looks like to people. And no hardware is a Dell server with dual Xeon 6core CPU, 32GB ram, Plex on SSD drive and 1Gbit network so don’t think there is any bottleneck.
Does it take a long time for the thumbnails to load when I scroll / browse through libraries… no it doesn’t, and no its not completelt unbearable but if the hardware / network can manage it there shouldn’t be any reason not to be able to browse through ones library and having to wait for thumbnails to load so it’s frustrating because the system should be better than this, especially when having paid a lot of money to PLEX.
I can somewhat understand on a remote server that you don’t want to load potential unnecessary thumbnails they may never be displayed over a slow internet connection but this should be up to the individual user to determine how many thumbnails in a library one wants to keep pre-loaded at any given time. Personally I almost only use it on a local network so there are very few bandwith constrictions.
Am I overlooking something in settings where you can set how many thumbnails you want PLEX to pre-load out of the visible field or is this a feature(I would call it a bug) that whoever is in charge of developing plex should get sorted out immediately so I can come in the next update?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this
1 Like
@intothebeast said:
Does it take a long time for the thumbnails to load when I scroll / browse through libraries… no it doesn’t, and no its not completelt unbearable but if the hardware / network can manage it there shouldn’t be any reason not to be able to browse through ones library and having to wait for thumbnails to load so it’s frustrating because the system should be better than this, especially when having paid a lot of money to PLEX.
That’s the problem. These devices do not have the memory to be able to hold all those thumbnails. Unfortunately, we had to set a line between performance and not running into out-of-memory issues. Our developers are always looking into this and make optimizations where possible.
Thank you for your answer. I can maybe understand that this can be an issue on a smart TV(I dont know the specs) but that a fully loaded Xbox ONE isnt able to keep an extra page or 2 in memory I just don’t buy. Thats like 25-50 extra smallfilze static images…but it handles new 3D games without issues… mhmm yeah no… something is wrong there. And even if RAM COULDNT hold it then use the HDD for temporary buffer.
If people dont want to task their system/use the internet bandwith with fluent title browsing, fine, then at least put the option for the rest of us that primarily use it on ethernet and want the best system possible
1 Like
@intothebeast said:
Thank you for your answer. I can maybe understand that this can be an issue on a smart TV(I dont know the specs) but that a fully loaded Xbox ONE isnt able to keep an extra page or 2 in memory I just don’t buy. Thats like 25-50 extra smallfilze static images…but it handles new 3D games without issues… mhmm yeah no… something is wrong there.
The memory used for UI elements is not the same as total memory available during gaming. During gaming, it’s not reading pictures from memory and sending it to the display. Commands are sent to the video driver and the images are generated instantly. Not quite the same. Being able to display all the images at once is more like having a really large desktop, the device is only designed to show 1 screen worth.
And even if RAM COULDNT hold it then use the HDD for temporary buffer.
The images are saved locally so it already does this. The delay you see is not the app downloading the images from the server, it’s just calling it up from the local cache into memory to display it on the screen. Like I said, it’s possible to load more images, but at some point the device may run out of memory and could result in a crash of some sort. We have no warning when this might happen.
If people dont want to task their system/use the internet bandwith with fluent title browsing, fine, then at least put the option for the rest of us that primarily use it on ethernet and want the best system possible
Again, this has nothing to do with your internet or network connection. It’s a memory limitation of the device itself.
Ok, so here I am in 2019, thinking that something is wrong with my system since I have slow loading thumbnails on all my devices.
Then I find this thread and I cannot belive what I’m reading…
So your telling me, that i.e my android app pre-download artwork and keep them on my phone and that the 1-2 second delay that I’m seeing when scrolling is because the phone is to slow to get the pictures up on my screen? A ■■■■■■■ jpeg/png that’s maybe 1MB large… Holy ■■■■. How badly optimized for UI is plex clients? How hard can it be to load like a 100 pictures into memory?
Now, I also happen to have emby and they also have this issue, but their delay is much more tolerable (at least on the clients I use) I’d say their loading times are about a fifth of plex clients.
This might not be priority one on the things to fix but considering that you guys just completed Uno for the big clients without improving this is beyond me.
