games with extremely long loading times

[derlineUn]

I’m having a particular issue and I’m not sure whether the cause is webMAN or my external SSD. The problem is that my backups are not running properly.

The game starts normally, but the videos take forever to appear. For example, in God of War 3, the initial messages show up, then the screen goes black. After about 5 minutes, the Santa Monica Studio intro appears, and only after some more time does the opening cinematic start. The menus load without problems, and when I load into the game, I again have to wait a very long time. Once it finally loads, the game runs fine and I can play without issues — but the excessive loading times are frustrating. Also, some cutscenes have bugged or distorted audio.

God of War 3 is just one example — this is happening with almost all of my games.

The issue seems to temporarily resolve when I restart the console in Safe Mode and select the “Rebuild File System” option. After that, the games appear to run normally again. However, if I shut down the console and turn it back on later (for example, the next day), the problem returns.

I’ve already tried several solutions: resetting webMAN’s cache, disabling the content scan on startup and in /dev_ntfs, and I constantly monitor temperatures and take all possible precautions. The external SSD that contains the backups is formatted in NTFS with a 32KB cluster size.

In short, the main issue is extremely long loading times — sometimes 5 to 10 minutes, which doesn’t make sense. Even loading the game’s splash screen on the XMB takes a long time. I would like to know if there’s any possible solution for this. For every other problem I’ve had, I’ve been able to find solutions in forums, Reddit, or elsewhere — but this one seems very specific.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[aldostools]

I suspect that the issue is your external SSD drive. To verify it, copy the game to the internal HDD and test if the issue still happens.

Also verify if your console is running extra processes, like additional VSH plugins.

Once the game is loaded you can unload webMAN MOD to free memory and reduce CPU usage.

If you're on CFW, use the overclocking option improve the system performance.

[derlineUn]

Hello Aldo, thank you for replying.

Yesterday I was browsing through /dev_hdd0 to see if I could find any solution. I checked boot_plugins.txt and the only plugin being loaded was webMAN. However, when I looked inside the plugins folder, I found two webMAN files — one from the full version and another from the lite version.

I had previously installed the lite version, then later uninstalled it to install the full version. I deleted the remaining lite file and tried launching a game, and to my surprise, it worked very well. I was able to play without any issues.

What still confuses me is that I uninstalled the lite version quite some time ago before installing the full version, and this problem only started happening recently.

I haven’t turned on the console yet today, but if the issue happens again, I’ll report back here. I’ll keep this thread open until I’m sure the problem is fully resolved.

With the limited information I’ve provided, if you can identify any possible cause, please let me know.

As for the SSD, it seems to be fine — I recently checked it on my computer.

[aldostools]

Also verify if your console is running extra processes, like additional VSH plugins.
Well, 2 webman plugins in boot_plugins.txt enter in the category of "extra processes" 😉

This issue could be caused because the installer could not identify that webMAN plugin was being loaded. That can occurs in different situations. For example, when the plugin has a custom name different to webftp_server.sprx.

If the issue happens again, the first thing that you need to check is boot_plugins.txt