Big Campaign and Slow Performance

The title says it all. I have a very large campaign and I am aware that mass content will cause some reduced performance. I also happen to have plentiful of handouts and journal entries with pictures in them. I am looking to improve the overall performance of my campaign and I am wondering which of the following consumes the most performance: Archived Maps (dynamic lighting, large maps, many tiles etc) Handouts/Journal (Character Sheet 5e Shaped enabled) Other things I don't know about (?) Thank you beforehand. / Mal

Yeah, I would love to know this as well.  Massive home brew campaign, crap ton of maps, handouts, etc.

Would've been good to know. But I assume that even if maps are archived and made in Roll20 with a lot of detail they still drain more performance. I could be wrong, but it would be logical.

What I can tell you is that having a lot of characters (handouts are fine ) with a complicated sheet like this is going to impact performance (because every sheet will have hundreds or thousands of attributes). Maybe have a storage campaign to transmogrify unused characters into. Also, maps with lots of tiles are certainly slow while you're on them. Don't know if they slow down the game when you're not on the map, however. 

Yeah I have a backup campaign for maps. But all the sheets are sort of relevant and it'd be a damn shame to archive/relocate them. Makes me wish for the option to disable sheets in journals!

Jakob is on the right track, having large number of Characters + a complex Character Sheet is likely to be a factor. In Mal's case, 5E Shaped sheet, across how many Characters? GM can "Archive" some Characters and this might help, and this is probably the first recommendation to try.&nbsp; Wiki:&nbsp; <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Journal#Bio_.26_Info_Tab" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Journal#Bio_.26_Info_Tab</a> Undesirable solutions: Delete some characters, or change to a more simple Character Sheet with fewer attributes, or remake some of the characters under Journals as Handouts instead (so they won't have a character sheet.. also won't have a token). Ever-ready solutions: I will be happy to provide the standard troubleshooting steps for technical issues if you want to try that. The first step is to clear your browser cache periodically as this can help browser performance. To answer something Mal asked: Archived Pages (even unloaded map pages that are in the page toolbar) should not be a major factor in most cases, they don't load the page content until you're on the page so it is only the map thumbnails and titles that are adding a tiny amount to your page load at any given time. Even if the page toolbar was loading dozens of map thumbnails for the GM, it would only be a factor for the GM, because Players don't even load the Page toolbar at all and their computer only needs to load/render the page that they are on. Mal you mentioned dynamic lighting, the DL on the archived or unloaded pages is not a big factor, but the DL on the currently-loaded page can certainly affect performance. &nbsp;To test this just turn off the DL on the page where you experienced slow performance, reload page without DL and observe whether the slow performance still persists. &nbsp;If you find DL is the reason, there are tips for making streamlined DL or switch to just Fog Of War. Wiki of this:&nbsp; <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Dynamic_Lighting#How_to_Ad" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Dynamic_Lighting#How_to_Ad</a>...

Gold said: GM can "Archive" some Characters and this might help Unfortunately, archiving Characters will not prevent their Attributes from being loaded.

Gold said: The first step is to clear your browser cache periodically as this can help browser performance. This will help with solving technical issues, but should actually be avoided if you're simply experiencing slow loading times.

The Optimizing Roll20 Performance page might also help.

The game runs well but its choppy for sure. I've cleared out and transmogrified a lot of maps and characters. It has helped a bit but I wish there was an option to disable sheet for non-active characters.

Mal said: The game runs well but its choppy for sure. I've cleared out and transmogrified a lot of maps and characters. It has helped a bit but I wish there was an option to disable sheet for non-active characters. This wouldn't actually help as the sheet (the css styling and html and sheetworks) is an extremely small part of a character (especially with complex sheets like the 5e/pathfinder ones). You'd still have to have the attributes on the character, otherwise disabling the sheet would be akin to erasing the character back to a blank slate. It is the attributes and abilities that bog down the game as there can be several hundred (or more) per character which adds up when you have a game with 100+ characters in it.

Scott C. said: It is the attributes and abilities that bog down the game as there can be several hundred (or more) per character which adds up when you have a game with 100+ characters in it. I've heard of some GM's (pro subscribers) having a game created that holds just characters that they use to transmogrifier to and from to their active campaigns between sessions. I heard one liken it to having a character sheet notebook (precomputer). One could use the character vault that way also I guess.

Also, if by "slow", you mean when moving tokens across your map, if you use dynamic lighting, you should uncheck "update on drop". &nbsp;If you have this checked, the dynamic lighting has to update every time a player moves their token through a square. &nbsp;I realize it's used to prevent cheating during exploration, but sometimes you have to compromise in the name of brevity and momentum.

Interesting. Thanks for that note!

I have discovered one thing and this common on these types of Table Top simulations: The more you put on the map the more it has issues with it slows the game.&nbsp; Recommend trying this: for Background Maps only have one picture.&nbsp; If that means screen grabs of your heavily loaded map then create a single picture in like Paint or other program then that is what it takes.&nbsp; I used to create 1,000&nbsp;object maps (roll20 around 100 seems to bog down) .. yea.. slows to a crawl.&nbsp; That way your backgrounds are done in one Picture.&nbsp; Should reduce your number of background maps on screen and should free up from Tokens and Other needed things.&nbsp;

Yes yes I am aware of this. Unfortunately it isn't as easy and comfortable to do it outside of the game, to make nice looking maps takes a lot of effort from outside Roll20.&nbsp;

Mal said: Yes yes I am aware of this. Unfortunately it isn't as easy and comfortable to do it outside of the game, to make nice looking maps takes a lot of effort from outside Roll20.&nbsp; You could create the map in Roll20, get it how you want, scale to 100%, then take screen caps and stitch them together in a graphic editor into one large map.

Three of Swords said: Mal said: Yes yes I am aware of this. Unfortunately it isn't as easy and comfortable to do it outside of the game, to make nice looking maps takes a lot of effort from outside Roll20.&nbsp; You could create the map in Roll20, get it how you want, scale to 100%, then take screen caps and stitch them together in a graphic editor into one large map. Hmm.. I think i've tried that before and it got really blurry and horrible looking.

How many character sheets are you using?&nbsp;Did you put the whole monster manual into your game? If you did something of the sort I would recommend getting rid of those that you don't need immediately. Either put them in another campaign and bring them in or some other solution. You'll have this same problem on any sheet if you have a lot of characters - but that depends on how many.