Question VAM 1.2 loads slow on SSD on launch. Is there a way to set up the file Heirarchy in an optimal fashion?

[loves2spooge]

My drive is healthy and should read at 450mbps. my file size is pretty large and i think i have a lot of duplicates. What is the most optimal way to set up the folders in terms of load time when I launch? I updated from 1.9.1

 

[DJ]

Most of the load time is Vam processing information. The actual "reading data from disk" delay is pretty small.

I have done some testing and found that the larger my addonPackages folder, the slower the startup time. This makes sense, as VaM is having to go through every .var file to add clothing, morphs, look, etc to the vam menu system.

It's a major limitation with no obvious solution.

 

[loves2spooge]

Most of the load time is Vam processing information. The actual "reading data from disk" delay is pretty small.

I have done some testing and found that the larger my addonPackages folder, the slower the startup time. This makes sense, as VaM is having to go through every .var file to add clothing, morphs, look, etc to the vam menu system.

It's a major limitation with no obvious solution.

I assume the only workaround would be a complete rebuild ..

 

[DJ]

I've inquired about some sort of caching system, so VaM doesn't have to look through every .var file every time the game is run. No idea if that's a workable idea, though.

 

[loves2spooge]

they already use a shader cache which saves time, you can see it in action if youre loading similar assets, but I assume it cleans itself and archives it. having a cache for every package can only go so far before you start getting brickwalled by engine limitations and I was reading that the unity engine its built on cant utilize multithreaded cpu's which will bottleneck any cache.. the loadtimes on an SSD 550gbps read speed didnt seem to be and slower than my nvme m.2 evoPlus ssd that reads/writes at 3.6 gbps

 

[Williamwow123]

what is your start up time? you shouldn't have long load with a nvme m.2 my Addonpackage file is 52GB and it only takes 16-18 sec to launch.

 

[DJ]

I'm not talking about caching everything. But indexing everything (for all I know, this may already happen) and caching thumbnails for use in menus rather than building them all every startup. But usually when I have a suggestion like this, Meshed explains all the reasons it wouldn't help. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that's the case with this idea, too.
And like I say, I suspect actually reading data from the disk is a minor part of the load time. I have an m.2 drive, and startup with an empty AddonPackages takes 16 seconds. 40+ seconds when it's 40 GB or so.

 

[Williamwow123]

I'm not a super nerd or anything but storage write/read speed isn't the only factor to consider VaM is kind of next gen, I would expect people to have a beefy PC when trying to run it. IF you are running it on a potato i would expect really long load times. Dose CPU have play a part in it? I use a i7-9700k Its not multithreading but has high single core and i have 4x 8GB RAM @ 3200 mhz
edit: i doubt GPU has any impact but if so i have a 2070 super

 

[DJ]

I think CPU is the main factor. I'm running an i7 7700k, OC'd to 5 Ghz.

 

[loves2spooge]

of a clean version i can get it booted and running in under 10 seconds i think, every added package adds to that time. i find if i keep it under 50gb's its tolerable

 

[Williamwow123]

I think CPU is the main factor. I'm running an i7 7700k, OC'd to 5 Ghz.

Haven't OC mine it has a 4.9 boost that I'm happy with. From what hear about VaM is that Intel is actually the better CPU but I could be wrong.

 

[subs4]

I get mixed answers on this subject. Especially scene loading takes a lot of time but is it disk reading or computing that takes the time?

It takes a LOT more time to open a scene than moving the whole VaM folder from one SSD to another. And still I read that using mechanical HDD to save SSD space would make it significantly slower. What's the catch? Simply reading the file from even mechanical drive shouldn't take too much time.

 

[DJ]

Loading files from ssd is, of course, much faster than loading them from HD. But actual disk reading time isn't a huge part of the total loading time. The bulk of the delay is computing time.

 

[TToby]

Hi DJ, I would dare to speak against you.
When I am writing and getting answers from meshedVR, he always is astonished how much stuff people in the wild hoards in their VaM installations.
Once your VaM folder is as big as 160 GB, I guess you will have an other gaming experience as with a kept clean and fresh made VaM testing installation.
What I can say from my experience is, that my 160 GB installation on HDD had starting times from more than 2 minutes (was a lot more before meshed did that loading time optimizing) and with my new SSD it is less than half. So I would dare to say the words of wisdom: size does matters in real life, as always ;-)

 

[bumblebaetuna]

Delay into the game isn't bad for me. It's when the first Person is loaded and/or edited - seems to be when most of the stuff is read. After that, everything is normal.

VAM showing missing dependencies at start likely means it is reading every scene and every resource at once. I really don't need to know this unless I'm opening that specific scene. We don't need to read any other scene in-game that we aren't loading. That leads me to believe VAM could stand to better prioritize when/if something needs to be read. But I don't know how much the current code would need to be changed. And I could be wrong of course.

Assuming VAM opens and reads VARs every time during start: with versioning, how often do you need to read the same VAR? If checking for external edits (mostly needed for content creators/developers), storing system modified dates or requiring re-packaged VARs to be manually refreshed in-game to update, would cut this down significantly. Then it shouldn't matter how many VARs you had unless bringing in a lot of new content.