Cached Info & Disc Space

[CouchSprouts]

Hello everyone, I have a technical question about how much disc space will be used, or cached, during a playthrough, modded or not. I am coming from an old console (XBOX 360) and moved from LE there, to AE here on PC. I use vortex and have a mod list of only 308 mods, but after only 3 sessions of gameplay, I have lost 4GB of hard drive space. I only had 48.8GB to spare at the start of my game.

My questions are,

 

1) How does the game cache information, and where?

 

2) Will my game continue to cache at the same rate indefinitely, or will it slow down at some point?

 

3) Can that be cleared safely?

 

4) How much space do I need to plan on for a playthrough of the main story line?

 

5) Are there certain mods or mod types to avoid because of excessive caching?

 

I have attached a couple files of my load order. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I am new to modding.

Thank you for taking the time.

[anjenthedog]

Well I don' thinkin I can answer your questions directly (and I suspect it depends on a given player's particular load, based on the mods they use) but I can tell you that when playing I generally see no more than 16G of primary memory in use during an average play session, if that in any way helps you achieve your informational goal

 

Also afaik it all goes into memory unless swap or paging comes into play. I played for a long time with a dynamic paging file of 10-20G (min max) (now 20-40G) and a swap file size of 10G (which has been bumped up to 32G recently)

 

In my case, I increased their sizes due to increased CTDs of the odd source (no obvious reason) and screen freezes.

[7531Leonidas]

Check the Vortex documentation and the Vortex forum on Nexus Forums. My understanding - Vortex occupies its own footprint on your HD or SSD, and a d/l folder where it holds your mods. Those mods, once installed, are unpacked and linked via the magic of hardlinks to your game. Some of the drive capacity "loss" comes from the hardlinks being interpreted by windows as just more files on the drive, and those files do not really exist. This behavior, of course, makes it seem as you are using drive space much faster than you are.

 

Check the documentation to be sure.

 

Your other concerns - graphics/landscape/outfit mods can be the worst at eating up drive space, pay attention to the d/l sizes of all mods, and the patches/fixes that go with them. Most, if not all, of the Vortex caches are critical, and cannot be 'cleared' w/o removing the mods.

[CouchSprouts]

Thanks for the info anjenthedog and 7531Leonidas! I have noticed that the amount of memory that is being taken up has slowed down dramatically. I am currently playing through the main story line, and just arrived at the quest Alduin's Bane, and my total memory used is right around 9GB. I thought Vortex may be the culprit, for the convenience it is well worth it as a beginner though. I will definitely be reading up on Vortex. Thanks again for taking your time and lending your insight! You're both very kind!