# Bit of a slug speed wise ?



## phcjpp (Aug 26, 2003)

No insult to slugs intended but .....

I had 2 of the new virgin tivo's installed over the weekend and my wife and I had a proper play with them last night. It summary it seems really slow. About the only thing that is OK is the EPG. We had the original Tivo in the UK so were pretty excited to gewt the new one but must admit it doesn't seem to be much of an upgrade over sky at the moment. 

The search and on demand stuff is sooooooooo slooooooooow as to be almost unusable. There was a serious amount of huffing and puffing going on from the wife.

Looking through films to rent sent me running back to my AppleTv. Just painfully slow.

Is anyone else seeing this kind of performance ?

Cheers

Chris


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

It's variable - some days is snappy, others slow.
Seems they really should do more caching of data on the box.


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

phcjpp said:


> .
> 
> Looking through films to rent sent me running back to my AppleTv. Just painfully slow.
> 
> ...


Funny you should say that. A couple of days ago we decided to watch a film for the first time via Tivo and I also gave up browsing films as it was soooo slow and did it via Apple TV instead - now glad I upgraded my ATV 1 to an ATV 2 recently !


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## Nialli (Feb 13, 2011)

I've found my TiVo (now a month old) to be surprisingly fast, even with OnDemand. I'd say it was faster the my V+ and couldn't actually be any faster for all functions.


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

Nialli said:


> . and couldn't actually be any faster for all functions.


I'm not sure what you mean by that, it is very sluggish for most things in comparison with even a Series 1 which is 10 year old technology. I am really disappointed that they couldn't at least match the original performance.


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## ColinYounger (Aug 9, 2006)

I too don't see any slowness with on demand. I suspect it's something to do with network loading\loading on your segment of the network. It's not the TiVo that's slow, it's the getting data from the network.


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

ColinYounger said:


> I too don't see any slowness with on demand. I suspect it's something to do with network loading\loading on your segment of the network. It's not the TiVo that's slow, it's the getting data from the network.


So why is my Apple TV lightning fast (and also everything else I do on the internet).


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## geekspeak (Oct 1, 2002)

Mine is very slow too. Seems to be the discovery bar loading all the time slowing the menus down. Imagine when they start with the advert videos. Plus the poorly thought out menu navigation.


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

geekspeak said:


> Mine is very slow too. Seems to be the discovery bar loading all the time slowing the menus down. Imagine when they start with the advert videos. Plus the poorly thought out menu navigation.


That Discovery bar has a lot to answer for. I hate the thing, have not used it once yet, it just gets in the way and limits what can be shown on the screen. To think that it impacts performance as well just adds insult to injury.


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## richardc1983 (Apr 30, 2011)

I think if they activate the 2nd stage of the CPU it would be a lot faster I think.


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## m1ke (May 3, 2002)

richardc1983 said:


> I think if they activate the 2nd stage of the CPU it would be a lot faster I think.


i hope so

my tivo is fine whilst recording and during playback (inc streaming/iplayer etc)

its the menu's and interface where things get slow and the 'angry donut' (red busy ring) appears.

it can be very slow when scrolling down the my shows list, and generally navigating menu's. It's painfully slow when searching the on demand a-z (sometimes 30seconds or more page to page) - so i've completey given up on that.

It is not consitent tho, sometimes its not-so-slow and othertimes virtually unusable (whether or not its recording on one or more of the tuners at the same time doesnt seem to make a difference.)

Overall the new tivo is nothing like as fast as my old S1 which is a disapointment/frustration given we're 10yrs later on since then. But i'm definitely happy to stick with it the whilst Virgin iron out the bugs (and switch off debugging maybe?) just so long as they do.


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

m1ke said:


> It is not consistent though, sometimes it's not-so-slow and other times virtually unusable (whether or not it's recording on one or more of the tuners at the same time doesn't seem to make a difference.)


If it's not consistent, then it really must be network dependent - I don't think they are caching all those images - why not?
look how fast the guide is compared to other screens - no pictures, and that's also the only fullscreen HD page without the discovery bar...


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

m1ke said:


> But i'm definitely happy to stick with it the whilst Virgin iron out the bugs (and switch off debugging maybe?) just so long as they do.


But I'm not convinced they ever will. It's the modern way with software, just gets more and more bloated. Modern software development tools encourage feature creep at the expense of performance. The snappiest version of Windows ever was 3.1 (I used to run it from floppy), the most usable version of Word was 2.0 (had 99% of the features any normal user needs) etc. You have to go back at least 20 years to an era where programmers cared about performance (I speak as a system software developer throughout the 70's and 80's).


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

mikerr said:


> If it's not consistent, then it really must be network dependent - I don't think they are caching all those images - why not?
> look how fast the guide is compared to other screens.


Just scrolling menus shouldn't require network access - and anyway, I don't see erratic network performance on my computers connected to the same.


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## SPR (Nov 28, 2001)

tdenson said:


> Just scrolling menus shouldn't require network access - and anyway, I don't see erratic network performance on my computers connected to the same.


Impressive. How did you manage to connect to the same dedicated link to VM that TiVo uses, to perform that comparitive test?

We have no idea what firewall or QoS structure is being used, or whether the same proxy/gateway is being used for external access. (Well at least I don't).


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

SPR said:


> Impressive. How did you manage to connect to the same dedicated link to VM that TiVo uses, to perform that comparitive test?
> 
> We have no idea what firewall or QoS structure is being used, or whether the same proxy/gateway is being used for external access. (Well at least I don't).


I thought the whole point of a dedicated link was to improve performance, not make it worse. 
It certainly has the feel to me of badly implemented software rather than a network bottleneck.


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## SPR (Nov 28, 2001)

When I segregate networks it is generally for security, rather than transport improvements.

The architecture for TiVo appears currently to use a private network (10.x.x.x) rather than a public address (88.x.x.x) as in the VM broadband access point.

Without knowing this architecture in full however, we cannot determine what to expect from an end to end perspective.


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## big_dirk (Feb 17, 2006)

richardc1983 said:


> I think if they activate the 2nd stage of the CPU it would be a lot faster I think.


what do you mean? is the CPU crippled?


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## big_dirk (Feb 17, 2006)

tdenson said:


> But I'm not convinced they ever will. It's the modern way with software, just gets more and more bloated. Modern software development tools encourage feature creep at the expense of performance. The snappiest version of Windows ever was 3.1 (I used to run it from floppy), the most usable version of Word was 2.0 (had 99% of the features any normal user needs) etc. You have to go back at least 20 years to an era where programmers cared about performance (I speak as a system software developer throughout the 70's and 80's).


I agree with what you're saying there. I read somewhere VM TiVo's interface is built on Java. I know some Java applets can be fast but generally in my experience they're slow and bloated.


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## Karnak (Jan 13, 2003)

The whole TiVo premier UI is built on Flash.


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## tdenson (Oct 3, 2002)

Karnak said:


> The whole TiVo premier UI is built on Flash.


That would explain a lot


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