I have 30+ Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) games on my Xbox 360 system.  For whatever reason, whenever I go to the XBLA blade of the Xbox 360's interface, I'm now treated to the longest and most frustrating load time in history.  It seems as though when you view this blade, the Xbox has to parse a really long XML file or fully navigate a directory tree structure on the hard drive in order to display the games (and their associated icons) that you've downloaded.  For what should be a reasonably quick and simple task, it takes an unusually long time.

When the Xbox 360 was initially released, if you had more than 5 or 6 XBLA games, you were treated to a horrendous load time for this blade.  They subsequently fixed it, and sped it up significantly with a dashboard update.  The problem is, as your games library grows, whatever fix they put in place becomes less and less effective.  Once you have 15 or 20+ games, regardless of how much faster the system now loads, displaying all of your games still takes an eternity.  And the best part?  None of the data gets cached.  So if you navigate away from the XBLA blade, and then come back, you get to wait again.  Awesome.  Thanks Microsoft.

This is further compounded by the way the system loads and displays your arcade games.  Whatever the system is parsing in order to display the games (whether it is a directory structure, XML file, etc.), it is doing it in a strictly sequential, chronological order.  For example.  Let's say that you downloaded Worms to your system first, and then eventually downloaded Chessmaster LIVE later on.  Now, whenever you go to your Xbox Live Arcade games list, you would see Worms load first, and then Chessmaster would load next, and the system would sort them alphabetically as it loaded them.

It doesn't take a degree in computer science to know this is a retardedly inefficient way of loading and displaying a list.  For every game you have, one by one as they load up for display, your list of games gets sorted, again and again.  If you have n games, this list will get sorted n times, right before your eyes.  You can see how this can become slow when your library has accumulated a few titles.  But regardless of the sorting inefficiencies, I think the majority of the wait time is still due to whatever structure the system is parsing in order to display the titles.

So what can Microsoft do to fix both of these issues?  Well, for one, they can create a sorted index file that gets updated every time you download or delete a game.  Whenever you download a game, this index will get sorted once.  And when you delete a game, it gets removed from the index with no need to re-sort.  When you go to your arcade game list, it reads this sorted index and just displays it in rapid-fire succession. 

Now I'm sure there is something behind-the-scenes going on with the Xbox 360 that makes this no-brainer solution impossible, right?  I mean, there has to be.  Microsoft isn't stupid.  So what is the explanation for this list loading so slowly? Maybe they are loading all of the stats and acheivements for each game as this list is displayed?  Who knows?  If you have any insight, please leave a comment and help a brother out.  Thanks!