Lag opening Channel Guide

[rakosnik]

Recently when I try to go to the channel guide in Windows Media Center it takes a long time for it to open up. If it is the first time that I have used the guide in a while, it takes forever. If I have used it recently, it opens faster. When I am waiting for that first time for the guide to open, WMC kind of freezes up. If it is playing a video or live TV, it will continue to do so, but I can't do anything else in the WMC UI while I'm waiting for the guide to open.

At one point I thought maybe I had too much old data in WMC and perhaps I needed to clear it out. I've had WMC on this HTPC for years. When I go to the history in WMC it say there are 5469 entries. I was wondering if that had anything to do with the lag. However, recently the hard drive on my father's HTPC crashed. All of his recordings were backed up, so he didn't lose any of his videos. However, we did reinstall his operating system including WMC from a drive image we took the first week he got his HTPC. So he doesn't have all of the history data on his system that I have on mine. Despite that he has similar lag issues when opening the channel guide too.

I was wondering if this issue was related to the provider of the guide data switching over from Zap2It to Rovi a few months back? That might be when I started having this problem, but I didn't make the connection right away.

[stuartm]

I think lots of people are seeing this since the Rovi switchover. I don't remember it happening much (if at all) prior to the switchover. Now, the behavior I see is that the first access to the guide after a system boot is very slow 1-2 mnuites, during which WMC won't respond to any other key presses. And, I notice the disk light on almost solid during this time. After the initial guide access it responds fairly quickly, even if WMC is exited and restarted. Fortunately, I rarely reboot my HTPC's and just sleep them when not in use. Not sure what it is about the new guide that causes this behavior. Running the resource monitor and looking at what files are being accessed during the freeze might give a clue (haven't tried that yet).

[rakosnik]

Its not just the first time I use it after boot. I rarely reboot my HTPC too. It is more like the first time I try to use the guide in the last few hours that it won't respond to any other key presses.

[stuartm]

Interesting, that is different from my experience with the slowdown., do you see a bunch of disk activity during the unresponsive period?

[fel617]

rakosnik
I have the same issue.

[rakosnik]

I don't have a SSD in my HTPC. I'm sure that increases my input/output time over people with systems that have their instance of WMC running off of a SSD. Perhaps that explains the difference in our experiences.

[stuartm]

I don't have an ssd either, but I only get the slowdown once, perhaps it is a caching issue. how much memory in your HTPC?