[Investigated] Huge fps drops/stuttering in inventory

[monsta88]

Hi there,

 

I am experiencing big slowdowns in fps when I open any inventory (mine or any container, corpses, etc). I made a video about it, you can see when the snow in the background starts to stutter. 

 

Inventory lag.zip

 

It seems periodical and that makes me assume that a mod goes through the inventories to update their content.

 

I saw it happen regularly when opening the inventory of corpses, sometimes new items appear there. Most prominent of these new items are the collars from the Zaz Pack. For some unknown reason most enemies have one of these collars. It might be a completely different issue, but I feel if I could find which mod distributes these collars to the enemies, I could find the source of the inventory fps issue too.

 

So, is there a known culprit for this behavior? Here are the installed DD related mods (all AE). I added NEW to those which were not in LO before:

 

DD v5.2 + DD NG v0.4.1

Deviously Helpless Redux v1.3 - NEW

Sexlab Defeat v5.3.6 (after a short while I disabled it, but I did not remove it from the load order) - NEW

Acheron + Practical Defeat - the PD is NEW

Devious Training All in one 

Zaz v8+ and a couple of fixes

Unforgiving Devices v3.0.1

PetProject  v2.2.2

Simple Slavery++ v6.3.24

yps Fashion v6.9.2 

Ebonitium 

Devious Curses v0.6.1 - NEW update

 

It might be that none of these are causing the problem, as the Zaz collars are the unscripted ones, so they don't lock. Some other mod may think they are jewelry or something. Definitely not Dynamic Armor Variants mod though, I tested with and without it.

 

I can give more info if necessary, I just don't want to dump my LO at once, it is 700+ plugins.

 

Edited June 29, 2025 by monsta88

[traison]

Lag coincides with the damage numbers. Disable the mod providing the floating numbers and test again.

[monsta88]

2 hours ago, traison said:

Lag coincides with the damage numbers. Disable the mod providing the floating numbers and test again.

 

Good catch, I don't even notice those numbers anymore. They come from the combo of Player Succubus Quest and Floating Damage Numbers. There are some under the hood calculations in PSQ which end up displayed by Floating Damage.

 

That being said, it did not solve the problem, but led it to the solution. When I disabled Skyrim Souls RE, the lag disappeared.

 

As usual, thank you for your expert insight.

 

Edit: After playing a bit more, it seems it did not fix the original problem. In menus where there is no pause, I still have the stuttering, for example on the Crafting menu. A side effect though, that disabling the Skyrim Souls also fixed another smaller issue. I have a little mod which gives the merchants more gold, This stopped working too, merchants had only the vanilla amount of money. Now they are rich again.

Edited June 27, 2025 by monsta88

[anjenthedog]

In case you have increased your carryweight and carry large inventories, afaik skyrim's  database engine is inefficient. Large *personal* inventories (for me), make opening chests, urns, (etc),  and my own personal inventory slower to respond.

 

So once I start noticing sluggishness, it's time to open my bag-o-trash and start purging as much crap as I can to remedy it. At least temporarily anyway.

 

ymmv

 

no need to respond if this doesn't apply to you. just throwing it out as one potential cause. 

Edited June 27, 2025 by anjenthedog
typo...

[danna233]

Sex Lab - Sexual Fame Framework it does it. You can disable the distribution of zaz items in the mod menu

[monsta88]

7 hours ago, danna233 said:

Sex Lab - Sexual Fame Framework it does it. You can disable the distribution of zaz items in the mod menu

 

I checked it, I couldn't find it. Can you tell me where is it? I checked both the old SLSF and the new Reload MCMs twice, somehow I managed to miss it.   

 

Edit: Is it the "Allow Re-Equip"?

Edited June 28, 2025 by monsta88

[danna233]

53 minutes ago, monsta88 said:

checked it, I couldn't find it. Can you tell me where is it? I checked both the old SLSF and the new Reload MCMs twice, somehow I managed to miss it.   

 

Edit: Is it the "Allow Re-Equip"?

Probably. I haven't used this mod for a long time.

[monsta88]

20 hours ago, danna233 said:

Probably. I haven't used this mod for a long time.

 

Disabling it reduced the lag, so probably that was it.

 

 

On 6/27/2025 at 12:40 PM, traison said:

Lag coincides with the damage numbers. Disable the mod providing the floating numbers and test again.

 

I tested it. It is possible in the Player Succubus Quest mod to return to regular human race, thus disabling the background calculations which are getting displayed by the Floating Damage Numbers mod.

 

Almost all of the lag went away. I still have some at regular intervals, I assume another mod is also doing stuff in the background.

 

 

On 6/27/2025 at 11:33 PM, anjenthedog said:

In case you have increased your carryweight and carry large inventories, afaik skyrim's  database engine is inefficient. Large *personal* inventories (for me), make opening chests, urns, (etc),  and my own personal inventory slower to respond.

 

I do have increased inventory, I modified the SkyrimUncapper to give me more carry weight during level up (I usually have Legacy of the Dragonborn in the LO, so I made a bigger inventory, so I don't need to go back to unload all the time). That being said, the current issue is definitely linked to Skyrim Souls RE (disables menu pauses). I may experiment with its ini to re-enable pause at some screens to see how it goes.

 

The only horrible experience I have is the Crafting menu, I have many armor/weapon mods filling it (to be honest not so much that it should be this stuttery/unusable), it would be huge to find a solution for that. 

[traison]

1 hour ago, monsta88 said:

I still have some at regular intervals, I assume another mod is also doing stuff in the background.

 

Do you have Papyrus Tweaks installed? If so, what's your Papyrus ops budget set to? If you set it to something silly like me, then yeah it could be pretty much any mod.

 

Otherwise I think I'd have to see this problem for myself to figure it out. Performance issues in general are difficult. You'd really want profiling tools when dealing with them, and to my knowledge we really don't have any for 1170. If you're on an older version, there is a  Papyrus performance profiler on the Nexus that may be worth looking into. If for no other reason than to just rule out it being Papyrus.

 

On 6/28/2025 at 12:33 AM, anjenthedog said:

In case you have increased your carryweight and carry large inventories, afaik skyrim's  database engine is inefficient. Large *personal* inventories (for me)

 

While I sort of agree with you, like I couldn't imagine Skyrim being all too happy about you having a hundered thousand *different* items in your inventory, it's also far from the worst I've seen. A million of anything isn't an issue for a computer, but when you have a game inventory you're going to want to have an icon for items, a name, some stats. Maybe the inefficiency of Skyrim's inventory is that it loads a bit more than it needs to display the one item you're currently hovering over, perhaps to avoid there being microstutters every time you hover over another item.

 

If you want inefficient inventories, try Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl. That game loads every item in an inventory in its entirety - physically spawning the item inside the inventory box they're in. Even if it does not physically display items in the box in any way. As a veteran Stalker, I can tell you that you're playing the game wrong if the game doesn't freeze for a good 15 seconds as you approach your home base and your box-o-sh*t spawns in.

 

Edit: My point here being that when I've used QUI to for instance list all items in Skyrim.esm I haven't really experienced any issues worthy of remembrance. So not saying this doesn't happen, I'm just saying your pockets be deep, boi. 😆

Edited June 29, 2025 by traison

[monsta88]

17 minutes ago, traison said:

Do you have Papyrus Tweaks installed? If so, what's your Papyrus ops budget set to?

 

1700

 

I also have

bSpeedUpNativeCalls = true

 

I has a huge positive impact on the game. For example the Legacy of Dragonborn item sorter scripts run for a few seconds instead of for a minute or more.

Edited June 29, 2025 by monsta88

[traison]

bSpeedUpNativeCalls is the kind of fix that sounds awesome on paper but could be horrible in practice. Having game logic tied to the framerate is part of what makes up Consolitis. It's the same design that makes your inputs sluggish when the fps drops. However a game that was fundamentally built that way will be very difficult to convert to anything better. To put this another way, this has great potential for introducing race conditions. I doubt it has anything to do with the issue discussed in this thread, but this is something I'd keep in mind should there ever be odd crashing issues with the game.

 

Edit: The comments in the config file suggests it was done properly: using a synchronization object to keep things in line. So, perhaps this is safe.

Edited June 29, 2025 by traison

[anjenthedog]

1 hour ago, traison said:

I'm just saying your pockets be deep, boi. 😆

Three long, droll paragraphs just to counter an observation made over of the past 6 years playing what is supposed to be entertainment and recreation, not a programming job. You taking medications for that condition sweetheart? 

 

[monsta88]

26 minutes ago, traison said:

should there ever be odd crashing issues with the game

 

I have managed to reduce the crashes significantly after about 2 months of tinkering with AE. My current No1 crash happens if I quit the game while I am in a small cell, like a house. Loading the game works fine, but when leaving  that cell, if often crashes. It might have something to do with Faster SMP, I see that mod mentioned in the crash log. I understand, that the crash may have nothing to do with FSMP, I tried a lot of different installations of it (with/w/o CUDA, AVX/AVX2, compatibility config, etc), nothing helped. I can post some crashlogs if interested.  

 

However, if the game survives the 1st few crucial cell changes, it remains extremely stable.

 

A workaround for this is that I try to make the last save in the open world. When I play again, the game remains stable all the way, I regularly play 5-6 hours w/o any issue.

 

Unfortunately sometimes I can't make the last save in the open world, because sometimes the game softlocks (I hear the music, but the game is in "Not responding" state, I have to use the W10 Task Manager to kill the process) after SL scenes. It might have something to do with the aforementioned Player Succubus Quest mod, which does some things after SL scenes (damages NPCs, xp calculations, etc. 

 

Thankfully this softlock is quite rare, usually happens when the scene starts  in some unusual way, for example an attacker wants to initiate an SL scene, but I change cell before he reaches me, so the scene starts in a new cell. But all these are just my assumptions, based on empirical evidence.   

 

 

[traison]

36 minutes ago, monsta88 said:

I can post some crashlogs if interested.

 

Sure, I'll have a look at it. Consider creating a new thread though, unless you're done with this one.