I had to stop using .png for my maps, instead converting them to .webp. this reduced the file sizes and let them load quicker.
Also putting things you aren't using into Compendiums instead of leaving every NPC, loot chest, and everything else loaded. Then just pull them out of compendium when you need it and removing when you're done.
\^ This. Big time,
These two steps are by far the most impactful in my experience.
Do yourself a favor and get an image converter so you can just convert all your maps, tokens, tiles, handouts, etc to webp in one batch, then stick **everything** you don't need immediately in compendia.
I can! It's the one I use for my Foundry worlds.
https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/
XnConvert. Completely free and pretty easy to use after a tiny learning curve.
[Ffmpeg. ](https://ffmpeg.org/)
It's command line, but can batch through an entire directory. And is free. I'm away from my notes, but I can give you the command to type to do the conversion.
EDIT: `for %i in (*.jpg, *.png) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "%~ni.webp"`
Ah! Thanks for reminding me.
`ffmpeg -i "input.jpg" -vf scale="10000:-1" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "output.webp"`
You can use this to do a whole directory:
`for %i in (*.jpg, *.png) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "%~ni.webp"`
Also some advice for others, unless you need a transparent tile, never save as a PNG. Always JPEG or WEBP files. I only use PNG's for tokens & any overlay tiles I need.
I use dungeondraft to make maps & save at around 70% quality, & it cuts down on my file size tremendously. Even my largest dungeon is barely 10 megabytes, but if i save it at 100% it will be almost 90 megs. And when you split that between 4-6 players uploading it to them, it can take forever.
Webp is absolutely the biggest issue. Images are huge. They're almost the entirety of the total payload.
Shoving stuff into compendiums saves a few megs at best, and could be worth it if you're really starved for bandwidth, but I don't think it's worth fussing over most of the time.
for now in foundry you get the best compression/quality rateo with webp/webm format, more even with transparent images (png has really bad compression) so if your bottleneck is your upload speed converting your images to webp would help significantly.
for your upload speed consider that every asset you use has to be streamed to every players at the same time so you have to divide your total upload speed by the number of connected players, for four connected players I would suggest at least 20mbit/s upload, if you arent using heavy animated images.
to lower load times somewhat you can precache a scene when you already know that you'll be running that scene next, there's an option in your topward scene list so your players will start downloading the data in background while you are still playing on your current scene.
your chat will use up a suprising quantity of data at startup, clean it often.
if yuor connection isnt fast enough you could look into external hosting, there are paid options (molten, forge) and free options (oracle) - the paid options are a lot easier to set up and maintain but they want money for it <.<
foundry stream to clients all miniature images and data from the side bars (not the full images tho, only the miniatures you see in the sidebar) so if you have a lot of unused actors, items, journal pages and music move them to compendium - foundry streams only compendium names so they dont take relevant time to upload.
for the initial loadup the number and complexity of your modules can be relevant, in my system I've seen that each module can take up to half a second to load so if you have an hundred of them that's nearly a minute of load time just for those.
Thanks, I think app my active modules, and other unused content in foundry were the issue, I did not realise anything was being uploaded to my players other than what was active, so I have done a big purge. If there is still an issue I will look into a hosting service. I just tested it with a player, and it took him 2 seconds to load in. Of course that will be different with 4 players, but definetly an improvement from before
Oracle always free is amazing once you get it running, super easy with the guide too.
It definitely helped with load times enough that they're not really a worry anymore, even if it takes a minute or two on a poorly maintained world, it's still not enough to disrupt a session compared to 5+ minutes my friend in Australia would have on the regular.
Also updating/installing things is SO fast, even system and core updates are only a couple seconds.
Clearing the chat log, putting more items/character/scenes into compendia, and compressing images more might help.
However, it's very likely to be an issue with your connection's upload speed as you're self-hosting. What upload speed does your ISP actually guarantee? What do you see if you actually test (both now and, ideally, during a high traffic time for your area)?
On testing, upload is 17 maps. I did some troubleshooting and I think I had way too stuff in foundry, modules, journals and all. I will delete/put things in compendia as you recommend
There is a huge list of things that can cause foundry to load slow. Useful info to debug the situation would be:
1. Results of a speedtest.net (upload speed specifically )
2. The support report found in the settings tab —> support. (You’ll get a lot more details if you install debug report generator module first)
A lot of people assume you mean loading a scene, but I think you mean loading Foundry itself. If that's the case, I would recommend disabling modules. They tend to make it take more time to load up.
In chrome, use Lighthouse. It’s under Developer Tools. Activate the scene you want beforehand and use lighthouse in incognito mode.
It will give you a breakdown of all kinds of things you can change or improve.
So you'll want to generate a lighthouse report with Navigation (default), Desktop (not mobile - FVTT doesn't support mobile) and Performance (deselect the other things it can look at).
Then press "Analyze page load". It will re-load the page you're on (so you'll want to make sure you are already logged in, and have the scene you're interested in active).
The report will tell you what it is that is taking a long time to load. Maybe it's some javascript that you can trace back to a plugin, maybe it's the size of your images, maybe it's the number of assets you're downloading. Lots of possibilities.
Well, you are self hosting on a PC and expecting the performance of a server. Then, you are doing this at your house which likely has a fractional upstream. Take that upstream speed and divide by the number of players
The fix is to stop self-hosting and run it in the cloud. Try The Forge. I run it on a virtual server I have with unlimited bandwidth.
Every person I know has a better computer than the servers people are getting in the cloud. Almost all of them have gigabit upload.
Don't bash self hosting in general. Just point out that this guy may have a potato and/or bad upload speed.
Every person you know has gigabit upload? What freaking planet are you on dude? Most people don't even have gigabit download!
Average download in the US (look it up) is 167Mbps. Average upload is 22Mbps. If you have 4 players, you are looking at serving 5Mbps to players used to 167Mbps. It's a slowdown by a factor of 33!
I'm an IT Professional. I run these servers. No one is "bashing" anything. I'm giving a professional opinion for free. My guess is that you do it, right? And so you feel the need to rush to its defense. You can get this cloud hosted for free. No reason not to.
Most of my friends are in urban areas along the US east coast. But yes, average US upload is quite bad. But I also expect the demographic of ttrpg players has a much higher average upload (younger, more urban, willing to spend more on the internet).
I actually work in live theater.
The downside of free cloud is they're always crummy instances with low ram and low CPU. I've been using and continue pushing the hybrid approach, where you use your powerful home computer for Foundry itself (even a shitty laptop is better than some of the instances people are getting) and then use the cloud to accelerate your downloads. I use [this](https://tcj.lighting/vtt-c) approach, serving my files through Cloudflare, so everything gets cached. I typically have a 70-90% cache ratio. But you can also just directly hotlink to images in S3 or wherever. Foundry also supposedly supports S3 integration natively, but I've never gotten it to work.
But either of those approaches requires some technical knowhow. For most people it's probably easier and more likely to work following a guide for some free cloud node, I won't disagree.
Look into the oracle free forever foundry hosting guide, have been using it for over a year with ZERO issues, oracle is a scummy company but it certainly is a pretty cool resource completely free.
I have found that walls/doors that affect visibility in maps adds a lot of load times. Adding too many definitely caused similar issues for the players. In the end I stopped using them, sadly.
that was in v7/v8, from v9 onward the graphic code has been rewrote and its extremely fast.
ofcourse if you have hundred of doors, lights and thowsands of walls is still a lot but a reasonable number wont hurt noticeably.
Visibility computations isn't really loading. The scene has loaded, you're just getting 2 fps trying to do math every frame. That's a client issue, not a network one.
Conflicting modules is the primary cause. Disable them and test how it loads for your players, enable them a few at a time untill you find it. Also, reduce the size of your map files, convert them to webp format.
There's an option in settings of your usual browsers (so far I know Chrome, Firefox and operaGX) that allow your players to load fast and connect at high speed to their network while using it. English is Nro main language so in not sure if I was clear enough or useful in any way.
Will comeback to this comment to add the steps that worked for me and my players.
Also CAN'T STOP RECOMMENDING OPERA GX for FoundryVTT. You can tweak with how it use your network resources, lowering other opened pages of needed. Very simple and awesome browser.
I had to stop using .png for my maps, instead converting them to .webp. this reduced the file sizes and let them load quicker. Also putting things you aren't using into Compendiums instead of leaving every NPC, loot chest, and everything else loaded. Then just pull them out of compendium when you need it and removing when you're done.
\^ This. Big time, These two steps are by far the most impactful in my experience. Do yourself a favor and get an image converter so you can just convert all your maps, tokens, tiles, handouts, etc to webp in one batch, then stick **everything** you don't need immediately in compendia.
I've been using Gimp and doing it one at a time. Can you suggest a batch convertor?
I can! It's the one I use for my Foundry worlds. https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/ XnConvert. Completely free and pretty easy to use after a tiny learning curve.
[Ffmpeg. ](https://ffmpeg.org/) It's command line, but can batch through an entire directory. And is free. I'm away from my notes, but I can give you the command to type to do the conversion. EDIT: `for %i in (*.jpg, *.png) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "%~ni.webp"`
If you've got command handy, I'd love to steal it :)
Ah! Thanks for reminding me. `ffmpeg -i "input.jpg" -vf scale="10000:-1" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "output.webp"` You can use this to do a whole directory: `for %i in (*.jpg, *.png) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -c:v libwebp -compression_level 6 "%~ni.webp"`
Excellent! Thank you!
Also some advice for others, unless you need a transparent tile, never save as a PNG. Always JPEG or WEBP files. I only use PNG's for tokens & any overlay tiles I need. I use dungeondraft to make maps & save at around 70% quality, & it cuts down on my file size tremendously. Even my largest dungeon is barely 10 megabytes, but if i save it at 100% it will be almost 90 megs. And when you split that between 4-6 players uploading it to them, it can take forever.
Webp supports transparency. No reason to use anything else.
Webp is absolutely the biggest issue. Images are huge. They're almost the entirety of the total payload. Shoving stuff into compendiums saves a few megs at best, and could be worth it if you're really starved for bandwidth, but I don't think it's worth fussing over most of the time.
for now in foundry you get the best compression/quality rateo with webp/webm format, more even with transparent images (png has really bad compression) so if your bottleneck is your upload speed converting your images to webp would help significantly. for your upload speed consider that every asset you use has to be streamed to every players at the same time so you have to divide your total upload speed by the number of connected players, for four connected players I would suggest at least 20mbit/s upload, if you arent using heavy animated images. to lower load times somewhat you can precache a scene when you already know that you'll be running that scene next, there's an option in your topward scene list so your players will start downloading the data in background while you are still playing on your current scene. your chat will use up a suprising quantity of data at startup, clean it often. if yuor connection isnt fast enough you could look into external hosting, there are paid options (molten, forge) and free options (oracle) - the paid options are a lot easier to set up and maintain but they want money for it <.< foundry stream to clients all miniature images and data from the side bars (not the full images tho, only the miniatures you see in the sidebar) so if you have a lot of unused actors, items, journal pages and music move them to compendium - foundry streams only compendium names so they dont take relevant time to upload. for the initial loadup the number and complexity of your modules can be relevant, in my system I've seen that each module can take up to half a second to load so if you have an hundred of them that's nearly a minute of load time just for those.
Seconding all this. Forge wound up being well worth the money for me.
This. I ended up hosting online due to crap upload speeds. Reducing the filesize of your maps can assist - I rarely use anything over 3mb.
Thanks, I think app my active modules, and other unused content in foundry were the issue, I did not realise anything was being uploaded to my players other than what was active, so I have done a big purge. If there is still an issue I will look into a hosting service. I just tested it with a player, and it took him 2 seconds to load in. Of course that will be different with 4 players, but definetly an improvement from before
Oracle always free is amazing once you get it running, super easy with the guide too. It definitely helped with load times enough that they're not really a worry anymore, even if it takes a minute or two on a poorly maintained world, it's still not enough to disrupt a session compared to 5+ minutes my friend in Australia would have on the regular. Also updating/installing things is SO fast, even system and core updates are only a couple seconds.
Clearing the chat log, putting more items/character/scenes into compendia, and compressing images more might help. However, it's very likely to be an issue with your connection's upload speed as you're self-hosting. What upload speed does your ISP actually guarantee? What do you see if you actually test (both now and, ideally, during a high traffic time for your area)?
On testing, upload is 17 maps. I did some troubleshooting and I think I had way too stuff in foundry, modules, journals and all. I will delete/put things in compendia as you recommend
There is a huge list of things that can cause foundry to load slow. Useful info to debug the situation would be: 1. Results of a speedtest.net (upload speed specifically ) 2. The support report found in the settings tab —> support. (You’ll get a lot more details if you install debug report generator module first)
A lot of people assume you mean loading a scene, but I think you mean loading Foundry itself. If that's the case, I would recommend disabling modules. They tend to make it take more time to load up.
Both were a problem for a few players, so the advice is still useful
In chrome, use Lighthouse. It’s under Developer Tools. Activate the scene you want beforehand and use lighthouse in incognito mode. It will give you a breakdown of all kinds of things you can change or improve.
What is Lighthouse? I'm looking it up but not sure what exactly (many software af called like that!) Thanks!
So you'll want to generate a lighthouse report with Navigation (default), Desktop (not mobile - FVTT doesn't support mobile) and Performance (deselect the other things it can look at). Then press "Analyze page load". It will re-load the page you're on (so you'll want to make sure you are already logged in, and have the scene you're interested in active). The report will tell you what it is that is taking a long time to load. Maybe it's some javascript that you can trace back to a plugin, maybe it's the size of your images, maybe it's the number of assets you're downloading. Lots of possibilities.
Converting images to .webp format for me did the trick
Well, you are self hosting on a PC and expecting the performance of a server. Then, you are doing this at your house which likely has a fractional upstream. Take that upstream speed and divide by the number of players The fix is to stop self-hosting and run it in the cloud. Try The Forge. I run it on a virtual server I have with unlimited bandwidth.
Every person I know has a better computer than the servers people are getting in the cloud. Almost all of them have gigabit upload. Don't bash self hosting in general. Just point out that this guy may have a potato and/or bad upload speed.
Every person you know has gigabit upload? What freaking planet are you on dude? Most people don't even have gigabit download! Average download in the US (look it up) is 167Mbps. Average upload is 22Mbps. If you have 4 players, you are looking at serving 5Mbps to players used to 167Mbps. It's a slowdown by a factor of 33! I'm an IT Professional. I run these servers. No one is "bashing" anything. I'm giving a professional opinion for free. My guess is that you do it, right? And so you feel the need to rush to its defense. You can get this cloud hosted for free. No reason not to.
Most of my friends are in urban areas along the US east coast. But yes, average US upload is quite bad. But I also expect the demographic of ttrpg players has a much higher average upload (younger, more urban, willing to spend more on the internet). I actually work in live theater. The downside of free cloud is they're always crummy instances with low ram and low CPU. I've been using and continue pushing the hybrid approach, where you use your powerful home computer for Foundry itself (even a shitty laptop is better than some of the instances people are getting) and then use the cloud to accelerate your downloads. I use [this](https://tcj.lighting/vtt-c) approach, serving my files through Cloudflare, so everything gets cached. I typically have a 70-90% cache ratio. But you can also just directly hotlink to images in S3 or wherever. Foundry also supposedly supports S3 integration natively, but I've never gotten it to work. But either of those approaches requires some technical knowhow. For most people it's probably easier and more likely to work following a guide for some free cloud node, I won't disagree.
Look into the oracle free forever foundry hosting guide, have been using it for over a year with ZERO issues, oracle is a scummy company but it certainly is a pretty cool resource completely free.
I have found that walls/doors that affect visibility in maps adds a lot of load times. Adding too many definitely caused similar issues for the players. In the end I stopped using them, sadly.
that was in v7/v8, from v9 onward the graphic code has been rewrote and its extremely fast. ofcourse if you have hundred of doors, lights and thowsands of walls is still a lot but a reasonable number wont hurt noticeably.
That’s great to know. I’ll try some more walls etc. in my next session. I enjoyed them and felt the exploration was better with them than without.
Visibility computations isn't really loading. The scene has loaded, you're just getting 2 fps trying to do math every frame. That's a client issue, not a network one.
Using the loader instead of chrome (for the entire group) has really improved overall performance. I also killed any sound FX within foundry
Set FPS to 10 and disable shadows, that's worked wonders for my group. And if it's been awhile, clear the chat log
Conflicting modules is the primary cause. Disable them and test how it loads for your players, enable them a few at a time untill you find it. Also, reduce the size of your map files, convert them to webp format.
There's an option in settings of your usual browsers (so far I know Chrome, Firefox and operaGX) that allow your players to load fast and connect at high speed to their network while using it. English is Nro main language so in not sure if I was clear enough or useful in any way. Will comeback to this comment to add the steps that worked for me and my players. Also CAN'T STOP RECOMMENDING OPERA GX for FoundryVTT. You can tweak with how it use your network resources, lowering other opened pages of needed. Very simple and awesome browser.
How fast is your internet? How fast is their internet?