Solved Faster Scene Load

[haho]

I am having big problems with loading times in VAM, I know texture cashing is coming in 1.20, but I don't think that will fix my problem

My problem is the initial load times (before the textures evan start loading) - it can take up to 5 min. with a scene with 3 people and at least 1 min. with a single person scene

Now I have a lot of Morphs a lot of Clothes and a lot of Hairs - so the question is witch one should I clean in order to get faster load times ?

 

[meshedvr]

Whenever you add a Person to the scene, it scans your Custom folder for clothing, hair, and morphs. This scan reads all of the small .vam files which contain info on the clothing and hair items and allocates a small object inside VaM as a placeholder. This should be very fast, but I suppose if you have 1000s of items it could be an issue. For morphs it scans all the .vmi files, which are also small. The larger .vmb files are not loaded until a morph is used. Again all of this should be really fast because these are small files, but if you had 1000s of morphs it could be a lot of file reads which could be slow if you don't have a fast hard drive or SSD.

How many morphs and clothing/hair items do you have?

 

[SelchidhVR]

Whenever you add a Person to the scene, it scans your Custom folder for clothing, hair, and morphs. This scan reads all of the small .vam files which contain info on the clothing and hair items and allocates a small object inside VaM as a placeholder. This should be very fast, but I suppose if you have 1000s of items it could be an issue. For morphs it scans all the .vmi files, which are also small. The larger .vmb files are not loaded until a morph is used. Again all of this should be really fast because these are small files, but if you had 1000s of morphs it could be a lot of file reads which could be slow if you don't have a fast hard drive or SSD.

How many morphs and clothing/hair items do you have?

This is interesting. I know you essentially just answered this question, but I'm just confirming what I'm reading. Is it reasonable to expect an identical scene to load much faster if you're loading it with a clean install? I've been collecting assets for over a year now, and my main, dirty, VAM folder is full of bajillions of clothing items, textures, looks, morphs, etc., not to mention all the duplicates spread around by all the different creators naming/folder structures. You're saying the load time is not only governed by the scene being loaded, but by the clutter in the Custom/saves folders as well?

 

[meshedvr]

Load time for Person depends on Custom/Clothing, Custom/Hair, and Custom/Atom/Person/Morphs folders (including these folders inside any var addon). It scans and reads .vam files (for Clothing/Hair) and .vmi files (for Morphs) each time you add a Person atom or load a scene that needs a Person atom.

If you have a clean copy of VaM with just stuff you care about, scene loading will be faster for this reason.

I will say I'm working on a possible solution for this in 1.20 but I can't give details just yet.

 

[Gegecucu]

On the same topic, I noticed the following thing:
- Let's say I load a simple scene "A" --> pretty quick loading time
- Then I load another scene "B", more complex --> longer loading time (nothing strange since the scene is complex)
- In the end, if I reload the simple scene "A" ==> the loading time is much higher than the first time.

Is this normal?
If I load many different scenes, it gets to the point that VaM freezes completly during the loading (even if I load a scene already loaded in the session).
Only a hard reset seems to solve the issue but I find it a bit weird that VaM seems to keep in memory all the previous loaded scene up to the point of saturating.

 

[meshedvr]

VaM keeps an in-memory cache of some assets (mostly just the atoms themselves and not things like clothing/hair/skins) between scenes to help with load times so that is not freed between scene loads. If you don't have a lot of memory (16GB or more), VaM might end up having to load stuff off of Windows virtual memory (from disk) which is very slow. VaM does unload unused textures and the garbage collector generally frees up some memory between scene loads.

 

[haho]

Whenever you add a Person to the scene, it scans your Custom folder for clothing, hair, and morphs. This scan reads all of the small .vam files which contain info on the clothing and hair items and allocates a small object inside VaM as a placeholder. This should be very fast, but I suppose if you have 1000s of items it could be an issue. For morphs it scans all the .vmi files, which are also small. The larger .vmb files are not loaded until a morph is used. Again all of this should be really fast because these are small files, but if you had 1000s of morphs it could be a lot of file reads which could be slow if you don't have a fast hard drive or SSD.

How many morphs and clothing/hair items do you have?

thanks for the detailed explanation

I guess my problem would be the cloths - I think I have around 125 pages with 8 or 10 items per page that will make over 1000 items
the hairs are about 55 pages
and I already tried cleaning the morphs - I deleted most of them but it didn't make much of a difference

and yes i am running VAM from a SSD - just a standard SSD , but SSD

 

[Deleted member 1503]

Since you guys are already talking about this. How much of the slow load times is due to the program being limited to single thread CPU use also? I've got about 140gb of VAM stuff in a fast m.2 folder, with a amd 3900x, 64gb of 3600mhz ram & 2080ti, I get the same type of load times in VR as Halo does (depending on scene size can be several min). For me it seems mostly to hang up on the single CPU thread (100% single thread use and kinda hangs up on/off during loads).

 

[haho]

I don't think the single thread CPU can be fixed - pretty much all the software I know of is loading on a single thread CPU (please correct me if I am wrong)

here are the results of my effort to clean - morphs clothes and hairs:

I deleted about 4/5 of all the morphs I had, about 2/3 of all the clothes and about 1/3 of all the hairs and there was no significant improvement, probably less then 10%

 

[Deleted member 1503]

I don't think the single thread CPU can be fixed - pretty much all the software I know of is loading on a single thread CPU (please correct me if I am wrong)

here are the results of my effort to clean - morphs clothes and hairs:

I deleted about 4/5 of all the morphs I had, about 2/3 of all the clothes and about 1/3 of all the hairs and there was no significant improvement, probably less then 10%

Per a google serach (and watching CPU use in games), plenty of modern games can use 4-8 (ish) cores, as well as other programs. Not sure about the limits of the system that VAM runs on though. Although I thought I they said that v2.0 might incorporate more threads/cores, if true i'd think it would result in significant load time improvements, but again I don't know or understand the technical reasons behind this, just what google says (more core use = faster loads). Of course this is all very not helpful to your issue, but I think it's just the nature of the way the game optimization/programing currently. Load times seem pretty long even with a top end system.