Long startup time

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MacShot
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2013 12:43 pm

Long startup time

Post by MacShot »

Hi,

I'm using gPhotoShow Pro 7.2.2 on Windows 7. Lately I noticed that the screensaver takes quite some time to start and show the first image, about 15 seconds. During this time the screen goes black, and no date and time is displayed (which I enabled in the settings). The same thing happens even when I check off ALL directories containing images to be shown. It takes exactly the same time until clock and date are displayed - with the rest of the screen staying black of course since there are no images available to be shown. So I guess it's not a problem regarding the JPGs I feed into gPhotoShow. I also cleared the cache of the file list under "File Options" - no effect.

The problem also occurs when selecting Photo Wall or Scrapbook.

This seems to be an issue related to DirectX. Selecting 2D effects only in the Transitions window results in startup times not longer than 5 seconds.
I got the latest nVidia driver installed.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Mac
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gpb
Site Admin
Posts: 761
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:23 am

Re: Long startup time

Post by gpb »

Hello,
from your description the issue seems to be related to DirectX, maybe there is something on your DirectX installation that causes an error or causes a delay during initialization but I can't guess the cause.
Did you try to restart your computer ?
An error log from gPhotoShow could help but I will not be able to analyze it until the end of august. To create a log file tick the option in the About section of the gPhotoShow configuration window You can take a look at the log file and see whether there is some error, in case there is one you can perform a google search to see whether there is asolution.
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
MacShot
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2013 12:43 pm

Re: Long startup time

Post by MacShot »

Thank you for your response.

The computer gets a shut down at night and a fresh restart every morning before I use it. :-)
I created the log like you said. I don't see any errors. But I can see the extended time it takes for the first image to be displayed. In this case it was even longer than observed before. This seems to change from time to time. Yeah, some function in DXGraphics:: seems to be the culprit. However, DxDiag says there is no problem. Also, gPhotoShow seems to be the only program having any issues with the driver or whatever is causing this. Graphics, games etc. all do fine.

I'll send you the log in a PM. Thanks for looking at it - whenever you find the time.

Mac
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gpb
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:23 am

Re: Long startup time

Post by gpb »

Thanks for the log file.
The issue is caused by a single DirectX function which on you system is incredibly slow. Do you have other programs running in background or which causes a high cpu load ?
Another user had a similar issue, the function D3DXLoadSurfaceFromMemory takes lots of time the first time it is called by gPhotoShow, next times it requires less time but still a long time compared to other systems.
Unfortunately I didn't find any way to fix this slowdown, all functions of the same family take the same time and there aren't other functions I can use.
Consider that this function on your system takes 10-11 seconds, on my laptop it takes about 100ms (1/10 of a second) when using the Intel based display adapter, a little more when using the nVidia one.
I don't know why on some systems creating textures takes so much time. Maybe it's a bug in some driver versions or depends on some setting.Try to change DirectX settings inside the nVidia control panel. Maybe there is a quality setting that causes the driver to spend time optimizing the textures.
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
MacShot
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2013 12:43 pm

Re: Long startup time

Post by MacShot »

No, there's no background task causing a high CPU load. I got a laptop with a nVidia adapter, too. And there the start of gPhoto is as fast as it was on my desktop PC a couple of months ago. Maybe there really is a bug in the nVidia driver. I reset it to default settings and also played around with texture options - doesn't make a difference. Guess I'll just live with the extended startup. It's not a big deal anyway. I was just wondering what might be causing it. I'll keep an eye on it, and I'll post an update as soon as I see any changes (maybe after a future nVidia driver update).

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Mac
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