What does "Creating Snapshots" mean?

[ItMeNey]

I am using vortex for Skyrim Special Edition, and each time I deploy it does this in the end. What does it mean, what is it actually doing?

I've tried finding an answer to it but I can barely find it mentioned anywhere. I just installed a new mod and the 'creating snapshots' part took close to 40min to complete, and I'd like to at least know why Im waiting so long for it.

 

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask.

[Tannin42]

That's very weird, creating the snapshot is expected to take a second or two at most.

 

What it does is it creates a list of all files in the game modding directory. For some games we need that list so we can later figure out if new files were added to the modding directory and assign them to the correct mod (stuff like log files that get generated by mods)

 

Could you look for the file C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\vortex\skyrimse\snapshots\snapshot.json and tell me how large that file is?

[ItMeNey]

It is currently at 13.1 MB. I do have about 1040 mods installed which might contribute to the long time?

[Tannin42]

Well, the number of files is more relevant than the number of mods, if those 1000 mods consist of only an esp and a bsa then you shouldn't have a problem but even then. My test system has ~100 mods and taking the snapshot takes half a second or so and the snapshot is 500kb. Even if it is 10 times that we're still looking at a few seconds, not 40 minutes.

But 13MB is quite a lot, would you mind zipping that file and making it available to me in some way? (Dropbox or something?) You may want to do that as a private message because the file contains the names of all the mod files you have.

 

Also: You can go to extensions and disable "New File Monitor". That should disable the creation of snapshots completely. At least for Skyrim SE you shouldn't lose any functionality that way.

[Tannin42]

Ok, thanks Neydzz for sending in the file.

 

So I guess the bad news is that Vortex didn't do anything wrong. I was kind of hoping that it got misguided and started snapshot-ing files that weren't relevant. Hoping because that would have been something I could have fixed.

 

But no, the files contained in the snapshot are all mod files. It's a lot of them but perfectly valid for a massively modded setup.

Your system taking 40 minutes for this is wild, I honestly wouldn't expect this to take more than a few seconds, maybe half a minute the first time on a spinning drive.

 

Considering I can't make this go faster (the way we go through the directory is already quite well optimized, I swear) the only way to get rid of this is to disable the feature. For now this would be by disabling the extension, I will add a feature to disable snapshots for individual games so you can have the feature for less heavily modded games but disable for others.

[ItMeNey]

So I just installed the new update for Vortex, and suddenly I had a bunch of fomod folder and meta.ini files in my installed mods that Vortex wanted me to set up deploy rules for (Not sure if it's supposed to be like that or if it's a bug). After setting the rules up I deployed and even with the feature disabled, "running post-deployment tasks" still took a while (I gave it 5min and then closed Vortex).

 

I'd like to reinstall Vortex to see if my installation is somehow broken. Can I do that safely without messing up my mods? Will uninstalling Vortex leave the download folder and the mod staging folder intact?

[Tannin42]

The problem about info.xml files being discovered as conflicting is a known issues in 1.2.18, not just on your system.

 

Reinstalling Vortex will not break your installation unless you have put your staging/download folder inside the application directory.

However I can promise you it won't help anything. The fact these operations are all so slow indicate that either your disk is horrifically slow, to the point where I would say it may be dying or you have an Anti Virus installed that significantly slows down Vortex writing to that directory, although that can't really explain why the snapshot was so slow, that's primarily a read operation.

 

I'm sorry but I can practically guarantee you that this problem/slowness is not going to be resolved through a bugfix, reinstall or configuration inside Vortex, there is something wrong with that disk or your system.

[ItMeNey]

Well I was gonna try installing it to a different drive. It's currently sitting on my C drive (which is an SSD) and I want to reinstall it on my other SSD to see if it helps. I did install Malwarebytes not too long ago, so I can try setting up all the Vortex files as exceptions in that.

 

Edit: My C drive is almost full, could that have anything to do with it?

[Tannin42]

The relevant drive here is the drive where the game (and staging folder) is installed, not Vortex.

[ItMeNey]

Do you think there's a chance the problem could be caused by faulty RAM?

My drives have never had any issues, and I even double checked them all in Samsung Magician. The drives that Vortex touches both read and write at around 2.5GB/s.

 

But my RAM on the other hand has had issues in the past. I tried overclocking it once which should've been no problem, but instead my PC completely refused to start after I did. When that happened a friend of mine said that my RAM was probably faulty and the one I had (Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB) has been known to cause issues for other people.

 

I've been looking through the Vortex logs to see if it showed any clues of what was happening, and it did have a few messages like this:

"info: memory usage growing fast usage=773.2 MB, previous=333.5 MB, max=4.05 GB".

 

I'm currently waiting for "Running post-deployment events" to finish and Vortex keeps taking up more and more memory, currently bouncing between 600 and 900 MB.

 

 

Edit: Would just like to add that Vortex is only using 0.5 MB/s of Disk, so it's really just the memory that's being used.

 

 

 

Update: So I guess I found a fix for my problem. The combination of resetting masterlist on the plugins tab, reseting to manifest on the modlist tab, and deleting the FNIS Data makes creating snapshots take no time at all. After this worked the first time, I restarted Vortex and deployed again, and it got stuck on creating snapshots. But doing the three steps fixed it again. Could it be something with FNIS that is the problem, and it's getting stuck on snapshots because that's the last step before updating animations?

 

Disabling the feature in Vortex that runs FNIS on deployment also worked, so it feels like FNIS is the problem.