Hoster Power Hungry

[xxyzz]

Hoster 4.0 and above seems to be very power hungry. My songs that are in cue take about 10-15 seconds to load. If while a song is loading and you try doing a search for any new songs the search box gets grayed out for a long while.
I have a pretty power laptop and have no background programs running. All are disable thru msconfig. I was wondering if maybe I needed to upgrade to a laptop with a 512mb graphics card as my currect graphics card only has 256mb. I have been keeping the resoulation on 1024x768 also but would like to increase it.

Dell 1720, 17 inch laptop
Intel Cor 2 Duo T7500 2.2 ghz 4m L2 Cache
3gb Ram 667 mhz
2x320 hard drives kma files on second drive
256mb NVIDIA GeForce 640G

[madjim- with the Lord]

What operating sytem are you using?

Have you made all of the changes that MTU reccomends for your operating system?

There is a site http://www.blackviper.com where you can find many operating system tweaks that will help.

Jim

[ddouglass]

Try changing from 32 bit (true Colors) to 16 bit colors. This will speed things up and won't be noticable to the singers.
What type of song files are you using? Are these files coming from an external or internal drive? And have you cleaned up and defragged your drives lately?

[xxyzz]

Running vista 32 bit. All suggested changes have been made. I switched my settings to 16 bit 1024x768 that did not make any difference. My cpu usage is very low about 8% with only hoster open (idle) being used and no songs being cued.. Memory is at 41%.
My kma files are on the laptop but I have two 320gb hard drives installed. Hoster is installed on one drive and the KMA files are installed on the other drive. I would not think this would be a problem. Most of my song are imported from CD's but 25% are from zip files.
The bottom line here is when I am cueing up kma files it takes 10-15 seconds to load and this never happened prior to 4.0 coming out. It is not that big od a deal but does slow down my searching for songs. I can live with it, I am just curious if anyone else was having the same problem and I am probably trying to convince myself to buy a better laptop. I am one of those fools that are always buying the newest thing out there. However if buying a new laptop with 512mb graphics card vs what i have now (256) is not going to make a difference than I won't bother.

[marklwood]

I was looking at my configuration to see if anything has changed. It appears that the last Vista update has made changes to my services. I would do as MadJim suggests and visit http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm and make some changes to see if you can alleviate the issues. All of my Media Center services were back on, and I know for sure that I didn't turn them back on. I would also suggest a registry cleaner. I use a paid one, but have had good luck in the past with http://www.ccleaner.com/ in the past. I am sure that you can get this back to tip-top shape in no time.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by xxyzz

Running vista 32 bit. All suggested changes have been made. I switched my settings to 16 bit 1024x768 that did not make any difference. My cpu usage is very low about 8% with only hoster open (idle) being used and no songs being cued.. Memory is at 41%.
My kma files are on the laptop but I have two 320gb hard drives installed. Hoster is installed on one drive and the KMA files are installed on the other drive. I would not think this would be a problem. Most of my song are imported from CD's but 25% are from zip files.

I take this is two dives internal to the laptop. I hope that means you have Hoster installed on the C: drive. If this is so then no having them split like that is not a problem. Do ZIP and CDG KMAs take the same amount of time to cue up?

Originally Posted by xxyzz

The bottom line here is when I am cueing up kma files it takes 10-15 seconds to load and this never happened prior to 4.0 coming out. It is not that big od a deal but does slow down my searching for songs. I can live with it, I am just curious if anyone else was having the same problem and I am probably trying to convince myself to buy a better laptop. I am one of those fools that are always buying the newest thing out there. However if buying a new laptop with 512mb graphics card vs what i have now (256) is not going to make a difference than I won't bother.

I am a little confused here. Are you saying when you press play the Cue time is 10-15 seconds or the time it takes to add a song from search to the playlist?
Just for information to help us roughly how many KMA files do you have?

[dspins]

Thank you for bringing this up. I was going to start a thread addressing this problem. Hoster has given me lots of problems with the new upgrade. When music is playing in media player now, hoster actually interupts it when doing a search of the singers song database or when trying to rip cd's where it never used to before.

I have also noticed now that hoster seems to screw up badly when you attempt to add a CD brought into your show, especially while a song is playing in hoster. Used to be able to do this flawlessly before. Now the song timing will get messed up or other glitches.

Even though I had pleanty of Ram before, thinking it might help I upped the computer from 1.5 to 4 gig. (yes I know XP pro only uses 3 of the 4) This did nothing for this issue. The only other issue I can possibly have is my raid array. I am thinking I need to pull both my drives out of the computer and double check that they are both 400 gig WD blacks. (fast drives)

I know they are making changes to make hoster more vista friendly, but I sure hope this is not at the expense of the loyal XP users. I hope someone can nail down what is causing hoster to become such a hog where it used to be able to run with multiple other programs in the backround at the same time. I would choose a program that runs smooth over one that looks nice and runs choppy any day.

Thank you in advance for all you guys do at MTU.

[ddouglass]

How are you using the raid array? To expand hard drive space or to mirror your primary drive?
How many song entries in your singer's database for the person your are looking up?
Running Media Player at the same time as Hoster is a very bad idea for a couple of reasons. One is Hoster uses WMP as part of it's player process. Two is WMP is a memory and processor hog all by itself. When Hoster calls on WMP it does not open but uses parts of it that do not eat up resources.
Hoster is stable and behaves very well for most users. The problems you are having is most likely within your computer. You might read Marklwoods post and follow what he has listed there to try to figure out just what is going on with your computer.

[dspins]

The raid is being mirrored. As for the singer list, I do not know the exact number of songs, but it is more than 20 on a few of them. The longer the list, the greater chance of seeing a pause in the music. Another note, even if you run only hoster, loading CD+G's that singers bring in during a show causes problems. This is also a new symtom.

As for running WMP in the backround, I have been doing it for years without a hitch. I wish I didn't have to, but hoster cannot come close to doing the same things as WMP. I could make a list of why, but that is another discussion.

I will go read this post you are referring to however. Who knows, maybe there is something I missed somewhere that will help fine tune my system better for hoster. I must say I took care to put good quality hardware and ram into my system though. I am ahead of the curve when I look at what most hoster users are running a show with at the moment.

This is just my opinion, but I seem to remember a day when Hoster worked like a total and true champ for xp users and vista people had nothing but problems. Now it would seem that the more it is fixed for people who use Vista, the worse it run for XP users. I think the best thing that MTU could do in this situation is offer Hoster for vista, and leave the setup before for XP alone on a separate download link so everyone can have the best results possible. That way it is not bogged down with things that make it run worse for each group. Just my 2 cents there...

Again thank you for all comments. They help make Hoster better for everyone who uses it.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by dspins

The raid is being mirrored. As for the singer list, I do not know the exact number of songs, but it is more than 20 on a few of them. The longer the list, the greater chance of seeing a pause in the music. Another note, even if you run only hoster, loading CD+G's that singers bring in during a show causes problems. This is also a new symtom.

Think about the function of a mirror raid and how it operates. When you make any change to the primary drive it imediately is changed on the mirror drive. Now add that Hoster saves the playlist after everything you do to modify it. If you make any change to the Singer's Database this is also imediately saved. When you import a singer's disk a temporary file is written to the drive. If your ZIP files that you had imported (assuming they were not imported with 4.06 or 4.08) are still in ZIP (HDZIP) then before the file can play it has to written to 2 temporary files (unzipped). Now take all of this and double the activity to also write all this to the mirror. Add on top of all that the shuffling of data to and from the PageFile that Windows uses for itself and it becomes a lot of drive activity. Is the mirrored drive a problem? It could very well be and if it isn't THE problem it certainly will contribute to it.

I too have one computer that I test Hoster on that will cause glitches when I import from a singer's disk, but I fully expect this. It is my main computer at home and not a show machine. On this computer I have a lot of programs/processes running (both foreground abd background), because I do all of my business on it. However my show computers don't have a problem with importing while a song is playing. It seems that some people do and some don't and it has been that way through a lot of versions. My learned opinion is it has to do with the way some computer hardware is set up to handle I/O with the drives and how well they use the DMA, but that is getting a bit deep and there is no way for MTU to control that.

You might try running a mock show situation and keep Task Manager open to watch the Performance and Processes when you are doing all these things. This could help you pinpoint the major causes of the problem.

[dspins]

As always, imput is appreciated. I am going to keep watching to see if I can pinpoint what the resource hog is, but I just can't help but think changes to hoster are a major contributor. Thanks.

[xxyzz]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

I take this is two dives internal to the laptop. I hope that means you have Hoster installed on the C: drive. If this is so then no having them split like that is not a problem. Do ZIP and CDG KMAs take the same amount of time to cue up?

Hoster is installed on the C drive and the KMA files E drive both internalled stalled on the laptop.


I am a little confused here. Are you saying when you press play the Cue time is 10-15 seconds or the time it takes to add a song from search to the playlist?
Just for information to help us roughly how many KMA files do you have?

When I press play the time is 10-15 seconds.

[Beavis]

something is running in the back ground ! look in your task manager.

[xxyzz]

Nothing is running in the backgroud. I even disabled all startup services through msconfig.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by xxyzz

When I press play the time is 10-15 seconds.

What type of files (original file types) is this happening on?
Which version of Hoster are you using?

[xxyzz]

Hoster 4.8 and it happens on any kind of imported file.

[ddouglass]

The only things I can think of is to make sure and go back to the checklist for Vista
http://www.mtu.com/upgrades/hoster/v...de-hoster4.htm and make sure nothing has changed. It has been reported that some updates from Microsoft have changed some of these settings like turning the UAC back on.
The other thing I would suggest is to defrag both drives to speed up files transfer.
The 2 320GB drives you mention are these internal or external USB drives?

[gd123]

I think this was missed:

As a word of warning, it is not allowed to promote non-MTU programs in these forums.

for:

I would also suggest a registry cleaner. I use a paid one, but have had good luck in the past with http://www.ccleaner.com/ in the past. I am sure that you can get this back to tip-top shape in no time.

[marklwood]

Originally Posted by gd123

I think this was missed:

I believe it's more about competitors than all products.

[ddouglass]

Admin has never said anything about us not recommending programs or web sites (mostly freeware) to help get your computer running smoothly for MTU product running. It is anything that would be in direct competition with MTU or trying to sell your own programs (free advertising) through MTU forums.