[charlesmayo53]

On my Estuary home screen (Matrix and previous releases), thumbnails are very slow to load sometimes, and sometimes they don't load at all. I'm speaking of display like TV Shows-> In progress TV shows that shows a horizontal thumbnail list of the TV shows that I've started watching (i.e. https://ibb.co/V3CJ90t)? 

I have a super-slow rural internet connection... surely Kodi isn't loading every one of those thumbnails from the web every time that screen gets drawn? Doesn't it cache them or store them or something? Is there a way to make it faster?

[Klojum]

I have a super-slow rural internet connection... surely Kodi isn't loading every one of those thumbnails from the web every time that screen gets drawn? Doesn't it cache them or store them or something? Is there a way to make it faster?

Slow internet connections can "disrupt" the initial loading of thumbnails into Kodi's cache. What you can try is to go into the "Recently added" listing where the loading of thumbnails can be given another try by going thru the list and highlight each item for a moment. How "super-slow" is your internet link?

[charlesmayo53]

Slow internet connections can "disrupt" the initial loading of thumbnails into Kodi's cache. What you can try is to go into the "Recently added" listing where the loading of thumbnails can be given another try by going thru the list and highlight each item for a moment. How "super-slow" is your internet link?

My throughput runs from 50Kbps to 1.5Mbps depending on the time of day. In most of these cases, the slow thumbnails are from TV series that have been in the database for years and whose thumbnails have been displayed many, many times in the past, so I wouldn't think an incomplete initial load would be at fault.

The tvshow table doesn't have any defined BLOB fields where I'd expect to see binary data, but it does have a Thumbnail URL field that holds multiple image URL's (https://pastebin.com/XMJyJRqf) so if they're being cached, maybe they're only cached in RAM? My advancedsettings.xml file seems to be specifying ~60MB of memory but I'm not sure where that cache element came from. Maybe I should try bumping up the memory or just removing the cache element from advancedsettings.xml?
 

Code:

    <cache>
       <memorysize>62914560</memorysize>
       <buffermode>1</buffermode>
       <readfactor>10</readfactor>
    </cache>

[Klojum]

the slow thumbnails are from TV series that have been in the database for years and whose thumbnails have been displayed many, many times in the past, so I wouldn't think an incomplete initial load would be at fault.

For years... There is also the chance that some of the links to those thumbnails are dead links by now, as TMDB did quite the spring cleaning some time ago.

The tvshow table doesn't have any defined BLOB fields where I'd expect to see binary data, but it does have a Thumbnail URL field that holds multiple image URL's (https://pastebin.com/XMJyJRqf) so if they're being cached, maybe they're only cached in RAM?

Thumbnail caching is done 3-fold, via thumbnails in the video database, in the local Texture13.db database file, and the thumbnails themselves in the Thumbnails subfolder. Thumbs are definitely not stored as blobs in the database itself, that would create too much problems.

And yes, that c06 URL field is one of Kodi's design bloopers IMO. There are a couple of movies and TV shows that have so many poster links that this field is not sufficient. Storing all those poster URLs should not be necessary, it should contain only the active poster URL. I guess it's a souvenir from back in the days, when there weren't TV shows like GoT around with countless bits of artwork.