Is there a mod or a setting that can make the game save faster or without the lag that pauses the game when Oblivion saves?
The game pauses for about 10 seconds to save and it really slows down the game play.

To my knowledge no, mainly because of the fact that doesn't happen to everyone. It sounds to me like the games a little to much for your hardware, whats your computer specs? Other than that all I could think of is one of your existing mods is causing problems, have you always had this problem or did it just start up recently?

Yeah, it must be your set up. I hardly notice any lag at all and I have Streamline save every 10 minutes. I do run into that problem with Fallout though, after playing for awhile, which means I can't use any auto-save mod with it. So Maybe there's something about the game engine that makes it act up on certain systems. There's nothing any mod can do about that though, it's strictly a hardware thing.

Nothing to be done, it's lagging below the game's level of control. My saves take 3-5 seconds each to save.

The longer you play, and the more mods you use, the more game data there is to save, which makes the save files bother larger and longer to save.

Also, I've noticed that the more save files you have in your save game folder, the longer it takes to open the save menu. If you have lots in there (especially those that you don't use/need), perhaps you should delete some, or move them to a different folder.

Hey, I'm surprised no one else mentioned it, but you aren't using Autosave are you? It's been said before that Autosave saves can lead to savegame corruption. Also, I never save over a pre-existing save file. As others have said, I'd delete some of your unimportant saves and see if that helps, and turn off all the autosave options. Just manually save when you need to and you won't have that annoying pause every time you sleep or whatever.

If you have old saves at critical points that you don't want to delete, you can always back them up in a separate folder or zipfile and then delete the saves. come to think of it, it's about time for me to do some housecleaning...

I have turned off all saves and only save when I sleep or quit for the day. - that way no slow downs and adds a bit more of a challenge (if you die you lose all progress from the last time you slept)

A couple of years ago I learned by experiencing it that Morrowind can actually break by having too many saves in the save game folder - and as Oblivion/F3 is based on the same engine I've always backed up most saves to separate folders for all Bethesda games since.

How many saves is too many? I have 151 according to Wrye Bash. Is there any correlation to the number attached to a save?

No idea. I had hundreds when Morrowind broke down, perhaps 300 or even more. I'm a compulsive saver. But using the logic that if too many is bad it might be smart to head in the other direction, I never have more than perhaps 25 now. (Using the same theory when it comes to respawn time.) Hundreds upon hundreds in backup folders, though...

Makes me wonder then if the saves folder has the same silly restriction in Oblivion as the Data folder - > 400 files crashing the game and all that. I've never kept more than a couple hundred in mine because I don't like the clutter on the Wrye Bash tab.

The odd thing with Morrowind was that it didn't crash or anything - I rather got completely weird graphical artifacts, like everything except some items turning white. Couldn't figure out what was causing it until I read about another player having the same issues who had pinpointed it to having too many saves. I still can't see how saves can affect graphics like that, but there you are. When you mention it, the issues started suddenly so might be connected to some restricted limit.

EDIT: Sorry for OT btw. I also get pauses when saving, the longer I play the longer pauses. Rather convinced it is general overload as I get other issues like that after playing a long time.

Well, I have over 2000 saves in my folder and I get no issues other than it taking for ever to actually save, so you should be absolutely fine with 151 Arthmoor. Having said that I don't actually play a great deal, and I haven't played with a heavily modded game either. I keep meaning to clean out and organise those saves, but my time is much better spent actually modding

EDIT: Oh, and wyre bash takes ages to open, but I only use that for esp/esmifying things anyway.

OK, you win. Hm, wonder if more saves means more RAM somehow, so you rather hit some kind of overload if not having enough.

Don't think so -- I had over 1200 saves on my first run through of the game and the system I had at the time only had 1.5GB of RAM and never ran onto a problem. (Now I keep them in a seperate folder for back up and only keep about 20 or so in the actual save folder.)

OK, then it seems it was some kind of issue with Morrowind that was subsequently fixed perhaps. I'll stick with minimizing the amount of saves, though, because of load times with Wrye Bash etc.

Obviously after playing for a long time, you have additional issues like save bloating and the 200+hour animation bug. Also, adding mods apparently increases the size of the save file...

There is a fix for the animation thing, and I know some utilities can cut down on the save bloating; are their any other ways to clean a save for its long-term health?

I retired a char after 300+ hours of playing, beat the main quest, KOTN and did half of Shivering Isles, and my save files were getting close to 6 megs (5800 K at largest, I believe). I am getting a bit concerned as I started a new char and my saves are already close to that (around 5500 K) although I have added alot of mods this time around. Just seems like alot of bloating.

Soon I want to get better pc but for now I have this.
Here are my specs:

3800+ AMD ATHLON 64
3gb or ram
8600gt 512mb

Note that I don't have this problem with Fallout3 even though Oblivion runs better than FO3 saving is almost unnoticiable in FO3.
I do play Oblivion more and I have more hours in my saves but even my lvl 10 has the same issue with saving. And I play with about 110 mods per character and I merge when necessary so I don't think its my specs or the amount of mods. Plus I use Wrye Bash to clean the saves and reduce bloat. I do use streamline to auto save but I don't thats the problem. Maybe its the purging of textures in the memory possibly but i haven't heard of that being a problem.
It might be streamline purging the texture in my memory causing this or it could be my ini file settings. I was just wondering if this is a typical problem and the solution. My game doesn't crash much either but this one thing with the save lag has been nagging at me for a while now.