Auto-Saving Keeps Getting Longer - What to Do?

[seansps]

Your autosave issue does seem to be different. Hope you get it sorted out!

Thank you, me too!! If I can’t resolve this I may just switch to Foundry and deal with the lack of automation. But I am hoping I don’t have to.

[Zacchaeus]

I tested and it seems to take about 6 seconds to save on my computer - which is extordinarily slow.

I did notice that you have every module under the sun open and when I closed them all except PotA this cut 2 seconds off the save time. The modulestate.xml file notes many more modules that I don't own so you might try closing those as well. I note also that you are using a number of hefty extensions (from the extensionstate.xml file) and maybe closing those off and testing in a new campaign would help you test whether those are affecting the postion. Your spellcasting characters have all sorts of wierd notations next to their spells so I don't know where that comes from - probably an extension maybe? That too might be causing issues. Otherwise I'm not seeing anything which might indicate why it's so slow. My own campaign in PF2 with no extensions and six characters at level 10 saves in 0.1 seconds and my db.xml is currently 3Mb.

[seansps]

I tested and it seems to take about 6 seconds to save on my computer - which is extordinarily slow.

I did notice that you have every module under the sun open and when I closed them all except PotA this cut 2 seconds off the save time. The modulestate.xml file notes many more modules that I don't own so you might try closing those as well. I note also that you are using a number of hefty extensions (from the extensionstate.xml file) and maybe closing those off and testing in a new campaign would help you test whether those are affecting the postion. Your spellcasting characters have all sorts of wierd notations next to their spells so I don't know where that comes from - probably an extension maybe? That too might be causing issues. Otherwise I'm not seeing anything which might indicate why it's so slow. My own campaign in PF2 with no extensions and six characters at level 10 saves in 0.1 seconds and my db.xml is currently 3Mb.

Thanks for looking into it!

Yes I use a lot of modules because I reference and use a lot of content. I hope and wish that is not the problem here.

The spell notations are from the module for Rob2e’s spell effects. Never had an issue with that before.

I suppose it *could* be one of the extension or modules, but this does not explain why when I first set it up a month ago it was saving at under 1s and slowly crept up to 8s.

Something else is going on here. Thanks for looking into it though, but I don’t see a solution for me here.

[Nylanfs]

Just a thought, you don't have your live campaign data on a shared folder like a Google Drive or anything do you?

[seansps]

Just a thought, you don't have your live campaign data on a shared folder like a Google Drive or anything do you?

Nope- it’s just saving to the default campaigns folder in FG, not a OneDrive/iCloud/GDrive folder.

[nephranka]

I tested and it seems to take about 6 seconds to save on my computer - which is extordinarily slow.

I did notice that you have every module under the sun open and when I closed them all except PotA this cut 2 seconds off the save time. The modulestate.xml file notes many more modules that I don't own so you might try closing those as well. I note also that you are using a number of hefty extensions (from the extensionstate.xml file) and maybe closing those off and testing in a new campaign would help you test whether those are affecting the postion. Your spellcasting characters have all sorts of wierd notations next to their spells so I don't know where that comes from - probably an extension maybe? That too might be causing issues. Otherwise I'm not seeing anything which might indicate why it's so slow. My own campaign in PF2 with no extensions and six characters at level 10 saves in 0.1 seconds and my db.xml is currently 3Mb.

Just a point about the DB size. It is both the size of the DB and the timing of events while auto saving occurs, that seems to be some of the source of issues for the process, at least in my experience. Once I get to 5 MB it is really untenable so I have developed ways to reduce the overall size of the DB to help.

[seansps]

Just a point about the DB size. It is both the size of the DB and the timing of events while the auto saving it occurring that seems to be some of the source of issues for the process, at least in my experience. Once I get to 5 MB it is really untenable so I have developed ways to reduce the overall size of the DB to help.

Same. Again, in my case here, it is only 1 MB. So what is the save process really doing?

I feel like we should be given a use-at-your-own-risk disable-autosave feature until they can optimize this and fix it.

[Zacchaeus]

Thanks for looking into it!

Yes I use a lot of modules because I reference and use a lot of content. I hope and wish that is not the problem here.

The spell notations are from the module for Rob2e’s spell effects. Never had an issue with that before.

I suppose it *could* be one of the extension or modules, but this does not explain why when I first set it up a month ago it was saving at under 1s and slowly crept up to 8s.

Something else is going on here. Thanks for looking into it though, but I don’t see a solution for me here.

As your campaign progresses more code gets added to the db.xml and so it gets bigger and could take longer to save. Extensions add code to the db.xml and if you remove an extension then it can leave code in the db.xml hanging and it may casue recusrion if the save is trying to find stuff that no longer exists. Having every module open also makes the lists in the campaign huge; for example you have 93 pages of items. Now I don't know how FGU decides what to save but suppose that it needs to run through all of those lists to see if something needs to be saved. If it does then that's a lot of pages to work through. You can still access all your material but do so when you prep. If you want to use something from Fizban or Volo or Mordenkainen then open them when you prep and copy whatever you want into the campaign and then close the module. As I said closing off all the open modules that I could shaved 1/3 off the time it took to save the db. So having 30 modules open absolutely has an effect on the save time. You also don't really need the player versions of modules open; nor modules which contain only images or tokens.
Looking at the extensions list that you use there's a couple of odd things like 878507-Linkfill - I don't know what that is but if it's messing with links then that is one of the biggest things that need to be processed. Another thing to make sure of is that if you are using an extension that you have the latest version. It's always possible that some error is casuing a problem that you're not even aware of.

Overall, your campaign isn't that big; you haven't got a massive amount of images shared. I did notice you had a sizeable file in the moduledb for PotA most of which seems to have been changes made to various maps but I honestly don't know how that affects things. They have to be saved but I don't know if that is part of the save process or not. But given all that; we have to focus in of what might be the issue and elimiante them as possibilities. So closing modules and disabling un-needed extensions (better - starting a new campaign without the unwanted extensions) to see if that helps resolve the issue.

[seansps]

As your campaign progresses more code gets added to the db.xml and so it gets bigger and could take longer to save. Extensions add code to the db.xml and if you remove an extension then it can leave code in the db.xml hanging and it may casue recusrion if the save is trying to find stuff that no longer exists. Having every module open also makes the lists in the campaign huge; for example you have 93 pages of items. Now I don't know how FGU decides what to save but suppose that it needs to run through all of those lists to see if something needs to be saved. If it does then that's a lot of pages to work through. You can still access all your material but do so when you prep. If you want to use something from Fizban or Volo or Mordenkainen then open them when you prep and copy whatever you want into the campaign and then close the module. As I said closing off all the open modules that I could shaved 1/3 off the time it took to save the db. So having 30 modules open absolutely has an effect on the save time. You also don't really need the player versions of modules open; nor modules which contain only images or tokens.
Looking at the extensions list that you use there's a couple of odd things like 878507-Linkfill - I don't know what that is but if it's messing with links then that is one of the biggest things that need to be processed. Another thing to make sure of is that if you are using an extension that you have the latest version. It's always possible that some error is casuing a problem that you're not even aware of.

Overall, your campaign isn't that big; you haven't got a massive amount of images shared. I did notice you had a sizeable file in the moduledb for PotA most of which seems to have been changes made to various maps but I honestly don't know how that affects things. They have to be saved but I don't know if that is part of the save process or not. But given all that; we have to focus in of what might be the issue and elimiante them as possibilities. So closing modules and disabling un-needed extensions (better - starting a new campaign without the unwanted extensions) to see if that helps resolve the issue.

As mentioned before:

“I suppose it *could* be one of the extension or modules, but this does not explain why when I first set it up a month ago it was saving at under 1s and slowly crept up to 8s.”

Same modules. Same extensions.

At this point I feel like I need to jump through seven hoops to get FG working optimally.

I’ll be ok with the long save if it only happens on quit or when I request it. Refusing to offer a disable of autosave is weird. I’m kind of at my wits end.

[Trenloe]

I feel like we should be given a use-at-your-own-risk disable-autosave feature until they can optimize this and fix it.

That's a good idea.

I had a look at the campaign as well - running on Windows 10 on a fairly good spec computer, /save in chat would take between 8 and 9 seconds. I reverted changes on one module (D&D Princes of the Apocalypse) and the save time reduced to 0.2 seconds. Obviously that's not a fix, as it removes any of the modifications made to that module - based off the changed data for that module it appears to be changes to some images that make up the bulk of the data saved.

Investigating further, if I revert changes on only "The-Plunging-Torrents-Player" map, that reduces the save time to what I'd expect (0.2 seconds).

Thanks for providing the test campaign. Hopefully this will help the devs investigate further as we know it's an issue with one specific changed image in a module.