Question Will unzipping the vars and putting folders, with .var in the names, into addonpackages speed up my vam?

[fofofo]

Will unzipping the vars and putting folders with .var in the names speed up my vam? Will this help in common var required files+plugins, especially big vars? Will scenes, that require these vars, work exactly the same with the folders?

Will changing this make me have to redo my presets?

 

[KajaGoo]

I tested it myself some time ago.

When I deleted VAR files from AddonPackages after extracting them to their folders and altering scene/appearance JSON files to look in folders instead of VAR files, I only noticed a very decent increase of speed in launching VAM itself.

But I haven't noticed any speed boost in the main VAM load/save/usage when using extracted files only. May be because VAR files, although in ZIP format, are NOT compressed.

KG

 

[vamurai]

The above is also my experience. Load times for launching the application (as well as loading scenes) is definitely much quicker. In-game performance is not improved.

 

[TToby]

This should only speed up the loading speed a little bit. It was something that was officially suggested by meshedVR for this purpose. It will AFAIK not speed up FPS performance!
But to all readers: Normally you don't need to do this! Try this only if you exactly knowing what you are doing and you are very unhappy with your VaM loading time.
The effect is IMHO not that mindblowing (depends on how much stuff you have hoarded)... in most cases not nearly as much as like moving from a HDD to a SSD (do this if you are still on a HDD!). Maybe you will only see the difference with a stop-watch in your hand.
In return, you may screw up things.
My personal suggestion: Start VaM, go and get yourself a cold beverage, return und VaM is ready.
Or maybe put a good ammount of (uncritical) Var files on a spare drive and move them back if you really need them. I prefer to better wait some seconds more, because I am a lazy guy.

 

[fofofo]

Thank you all! I tried it and see the biggest improvements for loading time are for common dependencies and for really large (400mb+) var files.

 

[fofofo]

If anyone wants to speed up the process, instead of renaming the vars to .......var.rar one at a time, you can always put the vars that you want to unzip into a folder, then go to the command prompt in that folder and use the line rename *.var *.var.rar

 

[TToby]

For your interest:
Because I said above Var files will not have an effect on fps, but only on loading speed.

I've recently did some hours of testing at the benchmark thread.
The results have shown, that a lot of Var files with morphs in them may slow down your fps a bit, too.
But not only morphs as Var, but also unpacked morphs in general!
Though, this is IMHO only measurable if you are in a CPU bottleneck, so the GPU is not the limiting factor (so most likely not in VR). The difference apparently grows with increasing fps.
For me it was minus 7-10 fps from 180 fps in the benchmark scene with adding 5000 morphs at desktop resolution, and 0 (zero) fps in VR.

 

[VRmatt]

I tested it myself some time ago.

When I deleted VAR files from AddonPackages after extracting them to their folders and altering scene/appearance JSON files to look in folders instead of VAR files, I only noticed a very decent increase of speed in launching VAM itself.

But I haven't noticed any speed boost in the main VAM load/save/usage when using extracted files only. May be because VAR files, although in ZIP format, are NOT compressed.

KG

Honestly, I noticed a better load time also when I did this.
It leads me to believe that during startup, it will scan ALL of the AddonPackages, and not necessarilly scan all the scripts and scenes and other folders.
Either that, or in the process of moving the unzipped folders (Custom Scene, and Scripts) it ends up combining duplicate files (ie; deduplicating). So there is in-fact less files in the finished destination.

So yes, it is faster that way. Just my 2 cents, and I'm sticking to it

 

[SlimerJSpud]

If you feel you need to unzip vars, the correct way to do that (using 7zip) is the following:

With Vam shut down, select the user.resource.version.var -> RMB, unzip to new folder user.resource.version
Move the original .var file to a holding area outside of the AddonPackages folder. (Important!)
Rename the newly unzipped folder from user.resource.version to user.resource.version.var

The program does not care if the .var is a file or a folder. The program will work the same. I've done this to some vars that had unfixed bugs in them.

I've found a bigger influence on performance is to disable the Autoload morphs button on character vars where the morphs used are not generic, but character specific.