I would think that Process Monitor (Procmon) would be the way to conduct such an analysis, although interpreting the results is probably far from easy for most of us.

The mods themselves I imagine would not be so self-aware as to be able to measure their own loading time, especially when they haven't themselves loaded yet. Logically it seems that a process or mod to be able to do such a thing would have to be running before the game starts.

My suspicion is that StoryProgression would outweigh all of them hands down, though. And a "well progressed" world (long-running game save) would take much longer to load than a newer one because there would be so much more progression-related data to it.

I wasn't thinking of stories at all, i was thinking of data associated with sims. In other words, that which becomes attached to the sims themselves as long as the mod is present. A highly populated world with very progressed sims would have much more data to contend with than a lightly populated or newer game save with far less progression -- many of us see the huge difference when we travel to a different world within our saved games even though we have the same mods in play. The WA worlds especially, for most of us, do not usually progress very far even if we play with SP progression on during our occasional visits there.

So to me removing data either means removing sims or forgoing certain types of progression, like with careers entirely for instance. Although SP and career progression is usually targeted as causing slower game performance, so I wouldn't know how much of that translates to startup times.

Chain or one of the others here might have to weigh in on what kinds of data get dropped from sims when they die.

May I ask what problem we are trying to solve? Leaving aside what for some players could be insufficient hardware to even be running as much of the game they are throwing at it, how long are we talking about in startup times? Less than 7 minutes, more like 20 or 30?

When Procmon is running in the background, it can be set to track all of the process start and stop times and record them. It's not necessary to watch the monitor as the game starts up. although I suppose one could if the game were starting up in windowed mode. I remember using it, as encouraged to do so by J4Ks long ago, to help nail down the impact that silly FeaturedItems folder has on startup times if it's not locked down. That was many years ago, but I recall there being tens to hundreds of thousands of process calls of all different types being logged while the game starts up. Hence my thinking that analyzing such data would be quite a task for those of us not familiar with doing so.

I guess I have to ask the usual questions about this game that takes 30-40 minutes to load. Again for the moment ruling out insufficient hardware, and somehow I doubt you have a lack of RAM to work with (the Mac version of the game with its 2 GB built-in limit used to do this to me before I switched gameplay to Windows and there was no fix for that). How large is the nhd file and has it been Save Cleaned recently? I assume ErrorTrap and Overwatch, etc. are in play. Has a MC Reset Everything been run on it recently? Have household and sim inventories across town, by way of MC on City Hall, been checked for absurd numbers of inventory items? Might there be tens of thousands of unnecessary homeless and service sims showing up in MC's Demographics alongside of the very reasonable sounding 76 residents? Is CC merged where it is appropriate to do so? And how much better was the load time with NRaas mods only?

C-Dark wrote: ↑

September 9th, 2019, 5:24 pm

and did reset all objects in town

From MC's object menu or did you run a full Reset Everything from the Town menu on City Hall? They don't do exactly the same things.

Sorry for all the questions, but was just trying to rule out the obvious or most currently seen issues first. But I have to admit that I wouldn't want to play a save forward that takes 40 minutes to load and I assume around or at least half of that to save, at least not on modern hardware and not without trying just about everything I could think of to find the cause of the poor loading times.

I would also recommend the Reset Everything. You don't have anything to lose and I have unexplicably found that command to fix too-long startup times when nothing else seems to reach whatever it is finding to reset.