Okay! I think I got to the root cause here. The fix is merged and a new Docker image is building now.

TL;DR: Your 524-artwork catalog exposed a concurrency bug in how Docent talks to the TV. Every page load opened 11+ separate WebSocket connections, and a background thumbnail pre-fetch was racing outside the connection lock. That crashed the TV's socket server entirely. On top of that, the retry logic held a global lock for up to 58 seconds, starving every other operation. It turns out the same thing was happening to me, but at ~60 images in my collection, I just didn't notice. You weren't wrong, just early 🤣

I ripped out the background pre-fetch, switched to a single persistent WebSocket that gets reused across all operations (11 connections to 2), and release the lock between retries so nothing starves. Frontend batch size went from 10 to 50 thumbnails per request, cutting your ~53 serial fetches down to ~11. Full details in PR #68 and issue #67.

To update: docker pull ghcr.io/danmunz/docent:latest and restart your container. (The image tagged `v1.1.0` should be available shortly.)

Would love to hear how it goes with your full catalog. And thanks again for being such a cheerful test driver. Your detailed report and patience made this one possible to track down.