If you experience that Helium runs slow, you can try these tips:


Graphics

Graphics in Helium are rendered using hardware acceleration where available.

This means that if you use Helium over a remote connection such as Remote Desktop (RDP), no hardware acceleration will be available which will make some views run slower.

Some views are more graphic heavy than others, the better graphic card you have in your machine, the better the performance will become.

If you use background pictures, please note that very large pictures might make things run slower.

The same applies if you use blurring. Opacity will generally not affect performance.


Tips

  • Use the most recent graphic card drivers
  • Avoid background blurring if you experience that a detail view is slow
  • If album/artist details are rendered slow for a certain album/artist, try to inactivate background pictures for that specific entry

Browsing
If you have many tracks/artists/albums in your collection (30.000 and up) some views in Helium might be slow when using the default database format, SQL Server Compact.
Generally we recommend MySQL/MariaDB for the optimal performance with larger collections.
SQL Server (Express) is also a good alternative, but it is generally a bit slower on browsing operations compared to MySQL/MariaDB. On the other side, SQL Server is quicker on adding and updating items.
Some views are more heavy than others, examples of such views are:
  • Artist details, with a lot of albums and tracks
  • Statistics with a lot of data

If you are using SQL Server Compact with a lot of playing history, rendering of detail views might run slow. If you experience this you can try to inactivate "Render artist and album detail page statistcs" from Options > General.
If things still run slow, try this:
  • Migrate to MySQL/MariaDB or a SQL Server database
  • If things are still running slow, try to inactivate anti-virus and similar scanning software
  • Contact us for further assistance