How can I determine cause of long load times?

[reddog2058]

Greetings all. I recently fubar'd my Skyrim installed so it was time for a rebuild from the ground up. I downloaded a couple of collections, one for the basics and one graphics oriented. I've added a number of mods but still have less than 300. Load time from the time i start the game, to main menu, to the game opening up in my saved location can be over two minutes, much longer than before. Beyond the tedious backing out of each mod and testing load times, is there a tool or quicker technique to help find the culprit(s) for the extended load times? Any (sane) suggestions greatly appreciated!

 

[scorrp10]

I suggest enabling Papyrus logging and examining the log.

[ArcaneTourist]

I'd look at it as two separate times - how long for the main menu to be ready and how long it takes to load a save file.

As you say, how many mods you have does indeed impact how long it takes for the main menu to display.  I'm using a SSD.  If I use no mods and just after a reboot, it's only about 20 seconds for me to see the main menu.  If I use my normal mod list, it's a minute before I see the continue/load/quit main menu options.  If I exit and relaunch instead of loading a game, I'll see the main menu in 40 seconds - the 20 second improvement is due to OS caching.  Personally, the amount of time it takes from pressing launch to seeing the main menu isn't a significant percentage of my gaming/modding time.

Sometimes it takes maybe ten seconds to show a list of save games when I have a couple of hundred saves.  Loading a save takes 20 or 30 seconds for me.  My level 60 character has a 11 MB save file which is more or less typical for a large load order.

If your save file is much much larger than say 15 MB or so, you might have "save bloat" where some mod or combination of mods is causing excessive numbers of records to be added to the save file.

If your save is huge or if loading a save is taking too long, sanity check your save with Resaver.   There's a few issues that Resaver detects that will cause Resaver to give you a pop-up warning.  Actually, I'd pull the save into Resaver at least once a week just to see if  anything odd is going on.

Edited September 15 by ArcaneTourist

[reddog2058]

Thanks for the suggestions, will look at the logs.