Idea to Speed boot process up

[jonofmac]

Hey guys,

I've been reading on these forums for a little while now and decided I'd join in and say hi. Thanks for the great wealth of information on this site, you have no idea how much help it's been!

 

So I was reading on a forum post that one of the reasons start up is slow is due to the fact that the unit has to decompress the 7Zip files. Out of curiosity, I have a backup of entire flash disk, and I went and looked at the 7zip files containing images and found that the compression ratio is very high (5% of original size on the file I checked). Who thinks that we could see boot speed increase if we were to lower the compression ratio? Conceptually it seems simple. If we take more of a load off of the CPU with decompressing, we should be able to load this faster?

 

Does anyone know how it is that the software works? Does it decompress these files into RAM? or does it read from the 7z every instance a file is called upon? (I would think RAM, but to my understanding, the unit doesn't have a huge amount of it)

 

So I'm going to try this out today and see how my F90BT reacts. I've recompressed the archives to "store" compression (no compression at all, essentially a folder with an extension ) and I'll copy it in and see how it feels.

 

If you guys are worrying about space (because size is up to 20 mb from the original 1 mb), I just deleted all the maps and POI locations to places that I will never drive. Since I'm in Houston, Texas, I'll never be driving my car up to New york or Canada.

 

I'll post back with findings

[joegr]

There are also several small files that can be deleted. There are many files that are included for the navigation software to run with devices other than the AVIC.

I deleted all of those, files related to other countries, 3D landmark files, and un-needed language files.

That accomplished no speed-up at all, but I didn't try changing the compression ratio.

Interesting thought.

If something isn't found soon to speed it up and a fix for the bluetooth quality, I'll be replacing it with a Kenwood.

[jonofmac]

Gah, I think I might have to say this won't work...

 

I tried my the files with virtually no compression. Boot up was rediculous (well kind of). It "flashed" the main menu after about 10 seconds, but it then would show the splash screen after that and then hang. After replacing some of the smaller files with the originals, i was able to find out that the unit was not reading the files for some reason (all of the images were just boxes).

 

So I came back inside to try recompressing them with the lighest compression possible, which resulted in file sizes the same as the originals, just a few hundred KB bigger, which wouldn't result in any sort of gains, or at least anythign noticable. The compression went from the original 5% to 6%.

 

Maybe someone else might have more luck, but I doubt it.

I noticed that there is a 7z.dll in the apl folder which I guess tells the program how to decompress the files. Any chance we could replace it with a different compression and maybe have some luck?

 

I wonder if the unit can open regular zip files... those have poor compression ratios

[phr3akstorm]

If something isn't found soon to speed it up and a fix for the bluetooth quality, I'll be replacing it with a Kenwood.

 

Don't know if it will fix your BT issues but do you have the latest BT update? You can find it here.

[Yettavr6]

Good idea, a shame it didnt work I just wanted to add that an easy way to free up space on the internal flash is to move the whole iGo content folder to your SD card. If you have a fast enough SD card (class 6 or higher) i suppose this could also speed up the unit. I just did this, but my SD card is only class 4 so i didnt really notice any speed difference, but at least i have over a gig of free space on the internal flash now

 

Edit-

 

Just wanted to also add that the main reason I did this was to make it easier to update the maps, so i only have to copy them to the SD card, and not from the SD card to the internal flash.

[johnnyfidgets]

say i try this how would i stop the windows from booting up every time and/or how would i get it to boot up. help me to undersatnd

[Yettavr6]

I'm sure not sure who your question is targeted at. If me, you can move the whole CONTENT folder to an SD card, and then edit the sys.txt file in the igo folder to point it there. I need to do more testing on this however as I realized today after i did this that it broke the voice for both navi and VR (the voice files are stored in the CONTENT folder). Supposedly you can redirect certain subfolders of the CONTENT folder in the sys.txt, such as just maps, or maps and buildings, but that didn't work for me, which is why I redirected the entire CONTENT folder. But now i have the voice issue, so i need to play with it more.

[skicrave]

Good idea, a shame it didnt work I just wanted to add that an easy way to free up space on the internal flash is to move the whole iGo content folder to your SD card.

I probably wouldn't recommend that for long term use. Map updates come fairly infrequently, and SD cards fail a lot, especially when they're being read or written to constantly.

 

say i try this how would i stop the windows from booting up every time and/or how would i get it to boot up. help me to undersatnd

Read the FAQ.

[dwalton22]

Hey guys,

So I was reading on a forum post that one of the reasons start up is slow is due to the fact that the unit has to decompress the 7Zip files. Out of curiosity, I have a backup of entire flash disk, and I went and looked at the 7zip files containing images and found that the compression ratio is very high (5% of original size on the file I checked).

 

I was going to look into this too but there aren't any 7z files on my 700BT. I'm guessing they did away with the 7z files as part of the 2.0 update in order to speed up boot times.

[colnago]

Good idea, a shame it didnt work I just wanted to add that an easy way to free up space on the internal flash is to move the whole iGo content folder to your SD card. If you have a fast enough SD card (class 6 or higher) i suppose this could also speed up the unit. I just did this, but my SD card is only class 4 so i didnt really notice any speed difference, but at least i have over a gig of free space on the internal flash now ...

 

Maybe it "could" work with a combination of "unzipped files on SD card", along with changing RAM allocation in the Control panel. My 700 changes screens noticably faster after setting RAM skewed more toward Programs, vs. Storage.

 

That or we could toy with trying to overclock the processor.

 

[ill.die.trying]

Hey guys,

So I was reading on a forum post that one of the reasons start up is slow is due to the fact that the unit has to decompress the 7Zip files. Out of curiosity, I have a backup of entire flash disk, and I went and looked at the 7zip files containing images and found that the compression ratio is very high (5% of original size on the file I checked).

 

I was going to look into this too but there aren't any 7z files on my 700BT. I'm guessing they did away with the 7z files as part of the 2.0 update in order to speed up boot times.

 

there's no 7z files but all compressed files are decompressed by 7z (image.res, data.zip and so on)

[dwalton22]

Ack. Something I want to try is:

 

- unzip the contents of Data.zip and store them on the flash drive. Hopefully they just need to be unzipped in the same directory as Data.zip. If they need to be unzipped somewhere else that may be tricky to piece together.

 

- if needed, created a very small dummy Data.zip

 

It takes my laptop about 25 seconds to unzip Data.zip so if that step could be avoided that would have to improve boot time.

[BorisM]

Ack. Something I want to try is:

 

- unzip the contents of Data.zip and store them on the flash drive. Hopefully they just need to be unzipped in the same directory as Data.zip. If they need to be unzipped somewhere else that may be tricky to piece together.

 

- if needed, created a very small dummy Data.zip

 

It takes my laptop about 25 seconds to unzip Data.zip so if that step could be avoided that would have to improve boot time.

 

iGO has been designed from the ground up to work with a zipped skin. Besides, DATA.ZIP is compressed by ~90% or so. Unzipping it will waste about 35MB of memory for very little performance benefit. Besides, iGO grabs files from the archive as it needs them anyway.

[dwalton22]

Ack. Something I want to try is:

 

- unzip the contents of Data.zip and store them on the flash drive. Hopefully they just need to be unzipped in the same directory as Data.zip. If they need to be unzipped somewhere else that may be tricky to piece together.

 

- if needed, created a very small dummy Data.zip

 

It takes my laptop about 25 seconds to unzip Data.zip so if that step could be avoided that would have to improve boot time.

 

iGO has been designed from the ground up to work with a zipped skin. Besides, DATA.ZIP is compressed by ~90% or so. Unzipping it will waste about 35MB of memory for very little performance benefit. Besides, iGO grabs files from the archive as it needs them anyway.

 

I unzipped the data.zip to the iGo directory and created a dummy DATA.ZIP file. Everything boots and works just fine but I didn't see any difference in boot time. Something else must be the bootup bottleneck.

 

I don't think the iGO software grabs data as it needs out of the archive though...the only file in my data.zip was an empty foo.txt file.

[BorisM]

I unzipped the data.zip to the iGo directory and created a dummy DATA.ZIP file. Everything boots and works just fine but I didn't see any difference in boot time. Something else must be the bootup bottleneck.

 

I don't think the iGO software grabs data as it needs out of the archive though...the only file in my data.zip was an empty foo.txt file.

 

Actually putting things outside of DATA.ZIP is a standard way of overriding DATA.ZIP's files. iGO will use uncompressed files if they are present , and they override same-named files in DATA.ZIP.