Lag between songs

[Rainlover]

I finally got around to trying xlights. I loaded all of my sequences and audio to the xlights folder, created a playlist and started the scheduler. The first song plays then there is about a 90 second gap before the second song plays. During this gap, the cpu is pegged at 100%. When the second song plays, the cpu goes back down to 4-5% then there is another lag before the 3rd song plays.
My show computer is an old laptop with a P4 and 1G of ram.
Is this a computer issue or did I miss something in the xlights setup?

John

[holland lights]

Hmm im using a old hp computer with windows xp professional, the hp computer only has 1 gb ram on it also. It plays fine, i dunno why it wouldn't work on the laptop.

[sielbear]

How large are your sequences and does the gap exist on the second loop of your playlist?

[Rainlover]

How large are your sequences and does the gap exist on the second loop of your playlist?

I have 21 sequences that are from 4MB to 20MB. All of the sequences have the profile flattened in to the sequence. Maybe that is the problem.
I haven't run the playlist all the way through yet. I will try that and see.

John

[Rainlover]

I attached a profile to each sequence, added the profile to the xlights folder and ran the scheduler again. No change. Still a long lag between songs.
I really wanted to run xlights but I may have to run the Vixen scheduler again this year.

John

[rrowan]

Guessing you have a ton of channels. If you are not using all of them then I would remove the extra channels. I would bet it would run better on a faster computer. I think xlights is calculating each channel which is causing the delay (Matt can correct me if I am wrong).

are you using the latest version of xlights?

Rick R.

[taybrynn]

Those do sound like big sequence files.  Last year my biggest sequence was 4MB and most were in the 1-3MB range for 256 channels.

I'm not sure how the larger channel counts affect it, but I know my config file alone jumped from 316k to 1196k for adding
a 4096 pixelnet universe to the configuration file.

[sielbear]

My smallest LSP sequence file exported to LOR S2 (only one I've been able to export thus far) was 548 mb...  It's a beast...

[dowdybrown]

There is some significant processing that goes on each time xLights loads a sequence. I am working on a fix for this. It may be two weeks before it is ready though.

Note that the versions I've released this year run the same algorithms as last year - the performance is the same. For me, it is that I have more channels which causes my sequence files to be larger -- so they take longer to load.

Matt