Your comments
FYI, I first spoke to the Chunky dev re: this thinking it might be an issue with the app, but he suggested it is likely an issue with how Ubooquity handles paths-- i.e., perhaps it is using an absolute path when referencing opds-comics, e.g. /opds-comics, rather than honoring the reverse-proxy path, e.g. /<proxy_path>/opds-comics.
10 years ago
Some of them were WebP, not all. I didn't really notice much of a difference with them, which I guess now after reading these latest comments makes sense as I had just naively assumed it was serving the original images.
Hey Tom,
I did some further testing between the web browser (mobile Safari) and Chunky, and the results were somewhat inconsistent, so I'm not sure how helpful they are. When I tested yesterday, basically what I found is loading in the browser, while not being incredibly fast, was still roughly twice as fast as Chunky. I used both CBRs and CBZs, and tried both smaller and larger files. On the whole, CBZs seemed to load slightly faster that CBRs. Files with smaller images loaded quite a bit faster (obviously).
My comics that have what I would say medium-sized images took about ~4 seconds to load in the browser, and ~7-8 seconds to load in Chunky. Small image files took about ~2 seconds in browser, ~4 in Chunky. Larger images took around ~10-12 seconds in browser, and anywhere from 20-30 seconds in Chunky. Those ratios were mostly consistent when I was testing the first time, but I decided to try again this morning with one of the same medium-sized comics, and now when I tested the results were close to the same for Chunky as before, however now, the browser speeds were slower, more closely matching Chunky's speed, which aligns more with what you said.
I think extracting the archive completely at the beginning is preferable to extracting each page individually. Really the only downside is it will take a little more time initially, but the benefit of having each image loading faster is worth it. I liken it to streaming movies--they take longer initially to buffer, but I would much rather have that longer wait at the beginning than watch a choppy movie that pauses every few seconds to re-buffer. I think that should be the goal of any streaming service, is to give the illusion that whatever media is being streamed is running locally. Of course the streaming devices can't control sub-par network conditions, but if conditions are good, stutters and pauses should never be caused by the streaming device itself. I do like how Chunky attempts to "buffer" images to try and provide a more seamless experience, which is what I would expect. If I have to wait, really even just a few seconds, I would rather just download the file locally, because when I "flip" a page, I expect the next to be there just as with a physical comic. Having to wait takes me out of the experience.
I also think using native tools is a good idea. I wrote a script that automatically unrars or unzips (depending on archive type) all my comics when they are downloaded and converts the images to WEBP and re-archives them as CBZs (to try and help loading times). The unarchive process using those native tools is quite fast, even with larger images. But I'm also not a Java programmer, so they may not be much if any faster than the Java libraries equivalent.
Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope that helps some.
I did some further testing between the web browser (mobile Safari) and Chunky, and the results were somewhat inconsistent, so I'm not sure how helpful they are. When I tested yesterday, basically what I found is loading in the browser, while not being incredibly fast, was still roughly twice as fast as Chunky. I used both CBRs and CBZs, and tried both smaller and larger files. On the whole, CBZs seemed to load slightly faster that CBRs. Files with smaller images loaded quite a bit faster (obviously).
My comics that have what I would say medium-sized images took about ~4 seconds to load in the browser, and ~7-8 seconds to load in Chunky. Small image files took about ~2 seconds in browser, ~4 in Chunky. Larger images took around ~10-12 seconds in browser, and anywhere from 20-30 seconds in Chunky. Those ratios were mostly consistent when I was testing the first time, but I decided to try again this morning with one of the same medium-sized comics, and now when I tested the results were close to the same for Chunky as before, however now, the browser speeds were slower, more closely matching Chunky's speed, which aligns more with what you said.
I think extracting the archive completely at the beginning is preferable to extracting each page individually. Really the only downside is it will take a little more time initially, but the benefit of having each image loading faster is worth it. I liken it to streaming movies--they take longer initially to buffer, but I would much rather have that longer wait at the beginning than watch a choppy movie that pauses every few seconds to re-buffer. I think that should be the goal of any streaming service, is to give the illusion that whatever media is being streamed is running locally. Of course the streaming devices can't control sub-par network conditions, but if conditions are good, stutters and pauses should never be caused by the streaming device itself. I do like how Chunky attempts to "buffer" images to try and provide a more seamless experience, which is what I would expect. If I have to wait, really even just a few seconds, I would rather just download the file locally, because when I "flip" a page, I expect the next to be there just as with a physical comic. Having to wait takes me out of the experience.
I also think using native tools is a good idea. I wrote a script that automatically unrars or unzips (depending on archive type) all my comics when they are downloaded and converts the images to WEBP and re-archives them as CBZs (to try and help loading times). The unarchive process using those native tools is quite fast, even with larger images. But I'm also not a Java programmer, so they may not be much if any faster than the Java libraries equivalent.
Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope that helps some.
So I found some weird behavior after testing this with both CBZ and CBR. First of all, Chunky won't stream most of my CBZs at all. Meaning that when browsing comics in my folders, if I tap on a CBZ comic, Chunky does nothing. It just remains on the browsing window.
I then tried tapping the download icon, and it acted like it was going to download but then stopped. I updated the permissions on the files in this particular folder to 777, and then it was able to download the comics via the download icon. However, tapping the comic name (to stream) still does nothing. The odd thing is, all the CBRs in that directory were still able to stream and download with the original, more restrictive permissions.
I then managed to find some CBZs in a different folder that actually would both stream and download from Chunky, and even stranger, they had the same restrictive permissions that the others did that wouldn't work. I checked the actual folder permissions for both and they were both 777. I haven't been able to find a single CBR yet that won't stream in this manner, so the issue seems to associated with CBZs.
Finally, to my original issue, I couldn't tell any difference in streaming performance between the CBZs and CBRs. They are both very slow to load.
I then tried tapping the download icon, and it acted like it was going to download but then stopped. I updated the permissions on the files in this particular folder to 777, and then it was able to download the comics via the download icon. However, tapping the comic name (to stream) still does nothing. The odd thing is, all the CBRs in that directory were still able to stream and download with the original, more restrictive permissions.
I then managed to find some CBZs in a different folder that actually would both stream and download from Chunky, and even stranger, they had the same restrictive permissions that the others did that wouldn't work. I checked the actual folder permissions for both and they were both 777. I haven't been able to find a single CBR yet that won't stream in this manner, so the issue seems to associated with CBZs.
Finally, to my original issue, I couldn't tell any difference in streaming performance between the CBZs and CBRs. They are both very slow to load.
Thanks for the info. I'll test some of both and see if there's a difference.
On a related note, it would be great if there were a way for Chunky to pre-cache a few pages. It doesn't appear to be doing this.
I have a mixture of both, but probably more CBRs than CBZs.
I do have a lot of comics, but they are all organized into folders. I am browsing by folder, but that's not the issue--it's fairly snappy. The issue is with loading the actual images in a comic--that's what takes ~20 seconds to load per page/image.
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