Long running campaign slowing down performance

[WinterSoldier7]

@WinterSoldier7 - how big is your campaign db.xml file?

Looks to be 15,767kb.

I do have folders of tokens and images not in the campaign folder, though, if that matters.

[Moon Wizard]

That is a huge. My longest multi-year campaign sits at about 1800 Kb, though this is before LoS, so assuming under 3Mb for most campaigns.

Also, images/tokens in the FG data folder outside the campaign still count for the total.

Regards,
JPG

[WinterSoldier7]

Ok, crikey.

I'll do a bit of spring cleaning and see what happens

[LordEntrails]

Basically that is 16MB of text. Stories, items, NPCs, but no images. My ~5yr 5E campaign that ran from levels 1-20 ended up at 7MB. My undermountain campaign with ~600 stories, and similar numbers of NPCs, parcels and a bunch of items and spells is only 5.4MB.

It would be a lot of effort, but you can move a lot of history type of stuff into other campaigns/modules and then not have them loaded when you don't need them. To do this; Duplicate (and rename) your campaign into several "chapters" or regions. Go into each campaign and delete everything but the info for that "chapter". Then export that chapter to a module. In your original campaign, delete everything that now resides in one of your modules. Then load the module when you need it and unload it when you are not using that info.

If doing that, you can also see my guide on module creation linked in my sig to learn about Development Campaigns and best practices.

[WinterSoldier7]

Thanks, I think I will do that - good idea.

How easy is it to update and add to a module?

I think - and this will probably give you some insight into where all of that memory is going - I will break it down into countries. Players only going to be in one of those at a time!

[LordEntrails]

Keep the development campaign. Then anytime you want to update the module, update the campaign and re-export. As long as you have not modified the object (story, item, NPC, etc) in your play campaign, the new version from your Devl campaign will automatically be shown when you access it via your play campaign.

[Trenloe]

Ok, crikey.

I'll do a bit of spring cleaning and see what happens

One thing that can, depending on the ruleset, take up a lot of space is a PC record. If you've made copies of PCs in the campaign, or there's older unused PCs, you may want to export those to XML as backups and then delete the exported, no longer needed PCs, from the campaign.

[MrDDT]

This is a lot of stuff being thrown out and it's mixing up a little of what is "memory hog" and "lagging" and "slowing down".

Different things affect different performance issues.

The best thing to do is state what issue you are seeing, and we can go from there. Because there is a lot of cross advice going which might not even fix the issue.

Example of this is an image being 4kx4k or more, has no effect on loading your FGU, unless it's shared.
You might see a small issue with clicking on your assets window and seeing some delay, but having one located in FGU isn't going to cause loading lag or playing lag.

Having a large DB isn't going to make your assets load slower when you click on assets.

Some things also can't be fixed past hardware issues.

Basic advice like "renaming chat log" is good overall advice as most people don't even use the old chat log at all. (I delete mine all the time, sometimes after each session), the log is normally used to go back and find information if you needed it on what was said or done in chat.

I also would as basic advice make sure you zip up your whole campaign once in a while and back it up onto another drive if you have a long going campaign (or even off the computer onto a backup drive or cloud storage)

[SylvanSnake]

Would be pretty cool if FGU could be optimized for 64-bit functionality. I imagine that's probably the biggest factor that causes slowdown. Need multi-threading and better memory utilization.

[Moon Wizard]

I'm not sure what you mean; FGU is built as a 64-bit application. Multi-threading is used when possible; but can not always be used due to order of execution constraints for rulesets to work as expected.

The biggest slow-downs tend to be when people place very large amounts of images/graphics and text within their campaigns, or load up very large size images. For data, it's generally pretty good, as long as rulesets limit display of data to a fixed number of records. For images, using recommended sizes improves performance greatly. We are tweaking things regularly, but any system can be overloaded if you place lots of data into it.

Regards,
JPG