DVDpedia Full Screen Performance is horrible

[The Ancient Mariner]

This may be my problem, but would appreciate a perspective. The performance of DVDPedia in full screen is horrible. What I mean by this is that when I swipe my trackpad to advance or reverse the cover flow listings the spinning beachball appears for minutes at a time. I usually have to Force Quit DVDPedia to regain control of my system. The system is basically unusable in full screen. Current work around is to not use Full Screen, but that's really tedious.

My configuration: 1700+ movies on a DroboPro attached via Ethernet cable to my 2009 Mac Pro. Mac mini (mid-2011 2.4Ghz Intel i5 w/2GB 1333 RAM) HDMI'ed to my Pioneer and connected by Airport Extreme to the Mac Pro. All the DVDPedia information I'm trying to access is resident on the mini. The mini runs nothing else other than DVDPedia OR iTunes but never both simultaneously. Most but not all of the cover art is high res at around 2-3 MBs per image. I would have thought there is more than enough capability there to handle a single application.

This problem has not surfaced recently but has been getting progressively worse with the addition of more movies. The configuration described above has been constant since the mini was purchased two years ago. When the library entries were around 1000 to 1200 this wasn't a problem I noticed.

So it sounds like it's a performance problem related to the volume of movies in DVDPedia. But I'm willing to accept another view if not just speculation. Water is further muddied when I use the same library directly on my Mac Pro. Although I'm not using a trackpad on that system, clicking at a high rate of speed doesn't seem to be a problem. So maybe it's not a DVDPedia performance problem, but a Mac mini performance problem.

Any thoughts?

[Conor]

Interesting, the number of movies should not be an issue for the full screen. It does not load covers ahead of time and only loads the 5 visible images. It does image caching so as not to have to load the image several times, but since you installed see the issue with simply starting up the full screen it would not be the cache. I have updated the DVDpedia beta anyway to flush the cache after 50 images, just in case.

Do run Activity Monitor on your Mini when the beach ball appears and you can select DVDpedia and click on the Sample button to capture what DVDpedia is currently thinking about. If you do this about three times and email me the results I can look at them and see if I see any common bottleneck happening.