Yes, that was all from today (two trial runs actually...the initial incident and then the reproduction). I tried to get it with scrollbars but the [ codebox ] function wouldn't work. Believe me, I don't like the huge scroll either. :/ Unfortunately I don't know much about the differences between the offsets (except in a few obvious cases) so am not much use in actually anolysing that log. I've just come back home now so will be paring down the list (just deleting the completely unnecessary/unused plugins outright hopefully will bring that number back under 400 as I've made a few "working copies" with stuff in the CS) tonight. If that number gets below 400 without any extra steps, I'll come back here and post my results. Merging plugins isn't something that's ideal but can be done...carefully. I've never tried to merge .bsa files before...wouldn't the .esp have to be altered to recognize the new path?

Edit: Although the new page means no more scrolling! Yay!

You just extract all of the BSAs you wish to merge into a common folder. Then re-build a new one from that folder. You can name it the same as any of the ones you extracted from and it will load and the resources will be avaialble to the game and the other esps as long as you keep that plugin enabled... or cheat and tack it on to the shivering isles esp. For example, I have a BSA called "DLCShiveringIsles - Merged DLCs.bsa" which contains everthing from all the other official DLC BSAs as well as the DLCShiveringIsles - Meshes BSA packed into it. This gets loaded automatically by shivering isles, so the individual BSAs that came with the DLCs are no longer necessary.

So for example just make a folder called "merge"... use the BSA extractor in OBMM to extract what you want into that folder. So you should see "merged\textures" and "merged\meshes" etc. Then when you are happy with what's in there (keep it under 2 gig) use the BSA creator in OBMM, tell it to load from a folder and point it at "merged". That's about it.

Just back up your original BSAs somewhere in case it all goes bad.

It seems leaving them uncompressed helps with load stutter too btw. Even on my box which is a Q6600 at 3gzh. The decompression still takes more time then the file io, at least for me. That is the default option in OBMM.

Bump for Historical Information..

Arthmoor here you go..

Heh, thanks. Wasn't sure what the search terms were for the title

You are welcome,

Process Monitor turned up too many..

But Searching for Microsoft and I found it pretty quick..Because I remembered that is was a download from MS product after all..

Glad we have ghosting and bain now..

I probably have a lot of unused textures/meshes from mods I no longer use. Will this effect anything?

Probably not. This "thrashing" issue is specific to the number of esm, esp, and bsa files you have.

FTLOG/T - BUMP!

zOMG/WATITMEAN?

I had BSA trouble and questions/comments and I thought it was related to this thread. I wanted to know if packing many mods into BSA format might help the oblivion file thrashing problem.

By intuition I think my ini list wasn't over 255 characters. I had other problems with BSA loading that confused me even when my BSA list was very short. I repacked oblivion textures with only stock textures and it wouldn't load even with the regular filename and no other BSAs loaded besides Fran's. The Main menu was white, there was no mouse icon texture, it was invisible. Loading with dummy esp instead of modifying the ini file did nothing.

None of my BSAs were over 2GB.

After reverting that to the normal BSA that came with the game, I was able to successfully load a small BSA I made using Wiseman's reduced textures by registering it in the oblivion.ini . So I wonder if the filesize of the BSA and types of files inside determine whether Oblivion will use it. Maybe there are bugs in the OBMM BSA packer or peculiarities in how oblivion loads BSAs. I haven't tried BSA commander yet. CorePc or someone in charge of OOO now said there was a lot of testing to do to pack files into a BSA for the next version of OOO. But what could that mean? Maybe those sort of things.

I thought my game had bad stablility and poorer performance after installing FCOM and many other mods. I thought the oblivion file thrashing problem might be contributing. I then noticed I had a 4.8GB textures folder full of 15,000+ files. And a meshes folder with 5,000+ .
I figured where all my many files were piling up from. I didn't realize how many mods came with so many loose files. I think if UOP, USIP and many mods with more than 25 files could use BSAs, maybe the Oblivion\data file thrashing problem wouldn't be so out of control when using many mods? What I have now, without even FCOM is about 2,000 textures and 2,000 meshes loose.

I did a fast estimate of many of my newly installed files on a fresh install looking in OBMM. Accuracy gets sketchier the higher the number of files.UOP - ~500 files?    (124MB OMOD)Cobl - ~300?  USIP - low hundredsThieves Arsenal - low hundredsCombat Taunts Removed - ~100Supreme Magicka 0.90 b3 ~75Ayleid Steps 3.0 - ~60Enhanced Vegetation - ~50TIE 1.26 - 1probably 15-25 more mods with not more than 30 files each and many with 2. ~300-400?Things not installed, some installed previously on the 15,000 file mega heap, and for comparison :OOO - 1-2k or more thousands     (~400MB OMOD)Unique Landscapes Compilation - 1-2k or more thousandsBomret's Detailed Normal Maps - ~700?Armamentarium (1.0) - mid hundredsBetter Cities - ?QTP3 - ?QTP3 Redim - ?Fran's - ? has BSAsMMM - ~10-30 Has BSA nowDetailed Terrain + DT SI pack - ~160Bob's Armory - ~175CM Partners 2.0 - ~90 because of mp3/lipAWLS ~65?Whispered Feet Max - ~70Tamriel Travellers - ~55Lost Spires - 2 (esp,bsa)     (~300MB OMOD)Enhanced Daedric Invasion - 2 (esp,esm)    (241KB)

So they can really add up. Does anyone know if and what difficulties there are with packing these mods files into BSAs? If mod's BSAs replace files in stock game BSAs, will they override and in what order?

You'll run into a second problem by generating BSAs for individual mods. The game's hard limit at 400 files would bite you in the ass fairly quickly. Some people get hit far sooner, as low as 300. So you can imagine the difficult spot this puts modders with lots of files in.

I understand now that BSAs supposedly count towards the ESP/ESM/BSA 400 limit after reading this thread. I think though it would be easier to merge BSAs included with many mods instead of creating BSAs from many mods manually since they can be arranged in BAIN style, OMOD style with/without script or in no particular order, there are more files total to sort through. with BSAs there would just be fewer to look at initially.

I merge many BSA files that come with smaller mods into one big BSA file to avoid the 400 file issue. For example all of Arthmoor's town mods bsas, and the various "misc" bsas that come with the other mods I use. I just call the merged mod "DLCShiveringIsles - Merged.bsa" and get rid of all the little ones.

The resurrection of this thread has me investigating lots of things big time.

I notice that among other errors, Oblivion.exe attempts to open HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders but omits the HKLM part, resulting in a PATH SYNTAX BAD error listing in Procmon. Lots of attempts to open test files that apparently existed during development, as well as at least one attempt to read a texture under Oblivion\Textures, ie, skipping the "\Data." Apparently also looks for all of the BSAs there, too. Sheesh and golly gosh, the list goes on.

At any rate, my quick question: I have lots of FAST I/O DISALLOWED "errors" in procmon, and tho the read/write attempts appear to succeed, I am guessing this is a chipset driver issue. I am off to take a look, but thought I'd ask here as well if anyone knows if this is a non-issue common in NT, or whatever.

Thanks.

nm.

Is anyone working on an Oblivion Code Patch the MCP works a treat & it seems Oblivions code needs a little love to . All this stuff might as well be latin for me .I often read things on here without quite understanding whats being said but I love the results Beebee

Woah, I am so glad this thread got bumped. My hard drive is going is running at near full throttle, lagging my game bad. I realized I have 360 files in the Data Folder. On the other hand, Nehrim, which is a whole new thing is hardly touching my hard drive in comparison. So... as I fix up the Data folder, what's the word subfolder contents, like the stuff in meshes, sound, and textures folder? Should I leave it as is? Or make a BSA for each?

Has anybody tested with a low iPreloadSizeLimit INI setting ? And with the background cloning thread turned off (there's an INI setting for that too) ? A quick look at the code reveals that most of the file walking function calls can be traced back to the background cloning thread.

I know I haven't. What do you suggest? Also, which setting is the background cloning thread? I'm actually having a fair number of ctd's right now and I do have some extra files in data that I'm thinking of removing...

Try reducing the preload size key's value and turn off all all settings that have the word background in them.

Messing with iPreloadSizeLimit has never done any thing interesting when I've used it. No evidence the game used any more or less memory when it's value was altered.

Is there one single setting for this cloning thread? Or are you really suggesting every setting with the word background in it is accessing it?

For instance, under Display, there's bStaticMenuBackground which doesn't sound like a file loading setting.

bBackgroundPathing, and bUseBackgroundPathing under the Pathfinding section don't sound like that sort of thing either.

In an effort to keep this information from being lost as many topics on these forums get "archived", I have created a wiki entry that mirrors the 1st post.

Continued discussion can still occur on the "Discussion" tab and information can be consolidated into the article.

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Oblivion.exe_file_and_directory_thrashing

LHammonds

Hopefully nobody minds prodding this back to the surface. Lots of useful info in here. Maybe this warrants a sticky?

Thank you Arthmoor for bumping this thread.

I must say, this was a fascinating thread to read, especially seeing the genesis of the "ghosting" process in Bash, which I find to be a fantastic feature in general.

Also, perhaps the first time I've seen actual posts from Wrye.