Cached Recursive Directory Walk

Cached Recursive Directory Walk

Usage:

When you start the game you will get a popup asking if you want to generate the cache. If you haven't generated a cache or installed new mods you need to press "Yes" and let CRDW generate the cache. Next time you launch the game you can press "No" to skip the cache generation.

Common pitfalls:

Tools like FNIS/Nemesis/Pandora/Bodyslide all create files into the Data\ which means you need to regenerate the cache after running these tools.

If you disable the Popup remember to re-generate the cache.

Benchmark:

Specs Ryzen 1600, 16gb DDR4, 1TB NVME SSD on Windows 10 with Mo2.

My modded skyrim instance has 409 811 loose files. Where 269 315 are sound files.

For the benchmark i started the game ten times with and without CRDW.

Before measuring the time i started the game just once to let Windows have it own caches warm to lower the variance between runs.

without CRDW with the average time being: 3:38m with ±2s

with CRDW caching: 36s with ±10s

What your takeaway from these results should be. If you have alot of loose files espescially sound files the startups might be shortened significantly. For me sound files make up 66% of my files as i use mods like DBVO which add a lot of loose sound files. These are twice as expensive to register for the engine as other files.

Mo2 and Vortex user might also experience divergence in results as Mo2 adds a measurable overhead to some Win API calls that the engine does during the walk. Thus Mo2 users should experience a larger benefit than Vortex users.

CRDW isn't a magic solution if you don't have many loose files this mod will not do anything for you.

Installing CRDW:

Install like any other mod with a mod manager.

For manual install just drop CRDW.dll and CRDW.ini into Data\SKSE\Plugins

How CRDW works:

When you run Skyrim the game walks trough the directories listed below and registers all the files in them.

CRDW hooks the function responcible for the directory walk and saves the results(filepath and size) into the .cache file.

The next time Skyrim starts up CRDW opens the cache and reads the results of the cached walk directly to Skyrim skiping the walk.

Skyrim also preforms a sound file registration during the walk. This sound file registrations preforms a seperate query of the file which CDRW also speeds up.

Directories Skyrim walks trough before game starts:

Data\Textures

Data\Meshes

Data\Interface

Data\Music

Data\Sound

Data\Scripts

Data\Strings

Data\Grass

The ESP, ESM, ESL, BSA and BA2 lookups are not cached by this m