Disabled Plugins, Staging Folders, and Excessive Sort Times

[nt5raham]

 

@Tannin42, @Pickysaurus, any feedback on my sort time results: Vortex 1 hr vs. LOOT 7 min?

:ohmy: They should be roughly the same.

 

Agreed. Is this something I can affect, or is Vortex choosing to take the long way around the block to get next door?

[nt5raham]

@HTR, to your comment about the vortex.deployment.json file, if it is listing every file as you say it is, I have a number for you. When I load my game Profile it says it is loading 233,585 files. That would indeed be a lot of entries for a .jason file.

[HadToRegister]

@HTR, to your comment about the vortex.deployment.json file, if it is listing every file as you say it is, I have a number for you. When I load my game Profile it says it is loading 233,585 files. That would indeed be a lot of entries for a .jason file.

 

 

Almost a quarter of a million files, and possibly being written to that json file on each deploy.

 

Check the time and date on that json and write it down, the next time a deploy happens, check the time and date again

[nt5raham]

 

Almost a quarter of a million files, and possibly being written to that json file on each deploy.

 

Check the time and date on that json and write it down, the next time a deploy happens, check the time and date again

 

I'm a step ahead of you on that one, just deployed and it is writing it each time.

[Pickysaurus]

Deployment and LOOT sorting shouldn't be directly related. I have a feeling it might be something in your setup. I may need to PM you for more information.

[nt5raham]

Deployment and LOOT sorting shouldn't be directly related. I have a feeling it might be something in your setup. I may need to PM you for more information.

Please do.

[nt5raham]

Here's an update, in case anyone is following this thread with interest. First, a big THANK YOU to @Pickysauras for dedicating gobs of time into duplicating this issue (multiple sorts at an hour each!) and diagnosing. I'm paraphrasing Picky, so if I say something wrong here, that's on me and not him.

 

Essentially, this is a limitation of LOOT itself, not Vortex. Sort times are nominal with both Vortex and standalone LOOT until userlist.yaml is brought into the mix, which immediately bogs both sort apps down. He reproduced one hour sorts in Vortex and standalone LOOT. Picky is planning to discuss this with @Tannin42 next week..

 

As a temporary workaround, removing the disabled plugins from the data folder brought the sort times back to about 5 minutes. Almost all of the 514 disabled plugins are assigned to groups, which I use in several customized Profiles which are each dedicated to creating specific merged plugins. It sounds to me like the combination of being both disabled and assigned to groups may be causing a problem...IDK. Removing 514 out of 1,287 plugins and it taking the sort time from one hour down to 5 minutes is disproportional. It can't be just about the number of plugins. Without the userlist.yaml, sorting all 1,287 plugins took about 7 minutes.

 

I duplicated this at home. I created a batch file based on plugins.txt and used it to move the disabled plugins to another folder temporarily. The batch takes about 5 seconds to run. Sort times in Vortex went from an hour down to 5 min. I just have to ignore the constant notifications from Vortex to deploy! Otherwise, Vortex will a.) try to restore the plugins, or b.) delete the plugins from the staging folder. Neither is desirable, because I still need all of those disabled plugins in the same condition in order to do maintenance on the merged plugins (add/remove/update plugins). All of the ITMs I removed and Form 43s I updated to Form 44 would have to be done again. What a pain!

 

Once I am through with conflict resolution, tweaking load order, and sorting, I can return the plugins to the data folder, do a one hour sort just to be sure, and play. These plugins belong to mods that I have merged, so they will never be enabled in my main load order. They only get enabled in their respective merge Profile where they are isolated from extraneous plugins.

 

TL,DNR The problem has been isolated and they're working on it. In the mean time there's a workaround.

[HadToRegister]

I'm curious as to why, when you remove ITMS and Update to form 44 from Form 43, you aren't packaging up the mod and saving it as a new mod so you don't have to remove those ITMs or convert to Form 44 anymore?

I do that all the time when I convert/clean mods.
If I update something to Form 44, I'll repackage the Mod, put my Initials as the first part of the New Mod and Name it after the Old Mod, and add a Form 44 and/or Clean at the end as well.

So Old mod "Female Armors.7z" becomes, after cleaning, and converting to form 44

Becomes "Dz - Female Armors - Form 44 - Cleaned.7z" in my Download Folder, so I can uninstall the original (which I then move the OLD mod to a folder I make INSIDE the SSE Download folder called "WORK" (which is where I keep mods that I have to manually extract and change, before moving them to the SSE download folder for use by Vortex)), and just install the edited and converted mod as if it was the old one, but without the hassle of having to convert it to 44 and delete ITMS.

[nt5raham]

Fair question, HTR. I haven't wanted to take up the disk space of saving two copies of the same mod (Vortex does that enough for me, thank you very much), and I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to other people's work. I prefer to leave the archive as-is. It's not logical, just a preference. In the same way, when I find/correct a problem with a mod, I patch it rather than change the original files. If I knew how do that with ITMs and Form 44, I probably would.

[Pickysaurus]

I've poked MacSplody on the LOOT team about this. I'm hoping they can shed some light on what is slowing LOOT down so much.