Not all of them are duplicates and it is far less than 700. As I said before, it would take thousands for you to see an FPS drop. Maybe somewhere in the range of 16,000, depending on your hardware. I couldn't begin to guess because there are multiple factors that affect FPS and I am not an expert in the VaM code or in the particular hardware that you are running, its drivers, what other apps you are running concurrently with VaM, etc.
There is nothing wrong with the preload option; it works as intended. You were just incorrect about how it works and what it is for.
I am glad you came to a decision that works for you. We came to a decision that works for the community, so it seems that everyone is satisfied. Cheers!
So i gave it a shot in the morning.
Firtsly, moved all my local custom morphs outside default dirs. Then did the same with all morphs packages vars [good thing i organize stuff so it was just one folder to move
]
So here are result with my main install, without morphs:
Then i moved back a few morph packages.
It gave me exactly 4300 custom morphs.
Firstly, with preload option 'on':
As you can see it ate ~ 5 fps average, and increased physics time by about 8%.
Now the fun stuff begins. Exact same morph packages [4300 of morphs], but with disabled preload
Performance from 'vanillish' test is back.
All these tests were made using same PC at the same conditions, during these benchamarks VaM was the only app running, besides of OS and drivers. Then the tests were repeated, giving the same results.
Conclusion: Disabling preload works exactly as i thought it does. It makes VaM remember which morphs are packed inside vars, but it DOES NOT load them on atom persons. Even with low number of morphs [these were just common morphs packages like reloaded, CuteSvetlana, yours experssions and a few smaller packages - which are basically in every single user install already], using pretty much top-tier rig we can notice perfromance drop just from the installed morphs. The differences will be even bigger with lower end CPU.
There is exactly 1528 files [divide by 2, cuz of VaM vmi\vmb morph files = 764 morphs] in only 'female' folders in just these three packages:
AshAuryn.Expressions.5.var
AshAuryn.Pose_Tools.4.var
AshAuryn.Sexpressions.5.var
Old ones [AshAuryn.Expressions.2.var, AshAuryn.Pose_Tools.2.var, AshAuryn.Sexpressions.2.var] contains exactly 880 files [440 morphs].
So we got here 324 duplicates. Which eats up about 1 fps average just for nothing.
Yeah it's not much.
But add there the very same dupes from VaMX for example [author of it just included all of yours legacy expressions, and refused to fix it to refer vars instead]. And we're loosing 2 already just from the expressions.
Just like that.