Skin.arctic.horizon: Arctic Horizon and Artwork Beef slowdown

I think this has actually been a symptom of Fanart.tv being overloaded for the last few days or a week?

Yeah this is nothing to do with the skin.

How images work in kodi:

• The scraper (e.g. Artwork Beef) writes the hyperlink to the http url in the relevant Kodi library database Art() entry.
• The skin references the artwork via ListItem.Art()
• Kodi checks to see if the http url is listed in the userdata/Database/Textures13.db database cache.
• For images that aren't cached, Kodi will download the image into local folders found in userdata/Thumbnails/*/.
• An entry is then written to userdata/Database/Textures13.db which links the online url to the local image (so it doesn't need to be downloaded again).

It takes time for the Kodi background loader to cache a large number of new images, which can be compounded by a slow (or non existent) response from the artwork provider (because it has to wait for each image).

With a large number of images there will be many rewrites to the Textures cache, which is why you would be seeing missing posters for items that appeared to be already loaded -- either the cache database was being rewritten at that point in time, or it was disrupted before it got written.

The texture database gets written in the background, so it can lag behind what you see on screen - if you exit the screen before it gets written then it needs to stop adding entries because it will need to access the database for the new section that you're in..

Thanks for the replies - it seems to keep downloading images when cycling through all my movies even ones that should have been previously cached. Is this expected behaviour?

Thanks for the replies - it seems to keep downloading images when cycling through all my movies even ones that should have been previously cached. Is this expected behaviour?

I'm not certain but I think there is a memory limitation on the background loader, so when it has a large number of images to cache it can impact its ability to display all the images.

It's just something that happens - particularly with Artwork Beef as it sets a large number of image types e.g. compare normal Kodi library setting only Poster and Fanart versus AB setting Poster, Fanart, Extra Fanart, Landscape, ClearArt, Clearlogo, Banner, Thumb, Key Art etc.

Once everything gets properly cached then it will settle down and work correctly.

In the past I've used the Texture Cache Maintenance utility to force caching of the whole database. I'm not sure if it still works (been a while since I used it)
https://kodi.wiki/view/Texture_Cache_Maintenance_utility

Thanks for the explanation of how it works. I have reduced the amount of images to download in artwork beef and the interface is now responding smoothly again.