EA App cloud sync enumerating save directory of games thousands of times
Product: The EA app
Platform:PC
Error Report ID (learn how to create an Error Report ID in the sticky post) 436d04a7-19a7-449f-a57e-98cdf6898538
Which client functionality are you experiencing this bug with? Launch Game
When did this happen? (dd.mm.yy hh:mm) 01.26.22 12:00
Summarize your bug (This is tested against Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Legendary Edition). The EA app has forced cloud sync which has terrible performance when a large number (1000+) of save files are encountered - far worse than it should. When looking at the application behavior in ProcMon it is apparent that a huge amount of time is being wasted enumerating the save directory hundreds of thousands of times. Games take so long to run that it appears like the game will never actually launch. With the new forced EA-app that came into effect today, I have seen many of my mod developers (I head the ME scene) seemingly be unable to run their game.
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Add a lot of save files to the Mass Effect Legendary Edition saves folder: For example in the modding scene we use this set of save files for each game, labeled (internally) for us to jump to any point in the game. In total this has hundreds of saves. https://me3tweaks.com/permanent/LEDebugSaves.7z These are extracted to: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Save - with each archive being extracted into the respective game. The game must have been run at least once.
What happens when the bug occurs? The EA app enumerates the save directory for this game hundreds of thousands of times - essentially running in O(N^2). It takes literally - I'm not even kidding - 5 minutes and 32 seconds for me to run the game. I don't know why it is constantly enumerating the folder list when it seems like it just needs to get a list of files and then cache that into a variable. This current implementation is extremely slow - on the levels of GTA 5 buggy login slow. It is faster when it doesn't have to do a full sync - we're still talking like a minute to launch - but when a save sync occurs (e.g. my other computer generates a new save) it's back to the 5 minutes to run thing again. It really wastes a lot of time, especially for my developers who constantly restart the game.
What do you expect to see? I expect better performance. I don't expect miracles but I also don't expect it to take 6 minutes to compare a local and cloud version of a folder that is not more than a couple of megabytes. At the least, I'd want to see one of three things (preferably all of them): 1. Better performance for sync. Do not enumerate this directory hundreds of thousands of times. 2. Show something to the user that something is happening. The app currently gives you zero indication it's doing anything. 3. Give me the option to turn off cloud sync like we could in Origin. That's why this was never a problem before (it was still a pain in Origin but could be easily circumvented).
Using ProcMon I was able to filter it to all activity by EADesktop.exe. When cloud sync occurs on game launch, you can see it querying the same directory thousands of times for some reason. I know a lot of this internal methods, but this seems far too excessive to be optimal behavior.
