Hey,

Thank you for the suggestion - scanning should actually be fairly quick since we use the Windows file cache, is your first time startup taking awhile to add all the apps?


I can definitely add the ability to “fast scan” which would avoid calculating sizes and just return the list of apps.

it took 2.5 hours and it was 1.2TB, and I have 6+(SSD and HDD combined) so... Explorer and apps stopped working during(I think) HDD scan, so I had to find other activities. but it was taking too long, so I had to cancel the process to at least start this topic.

Why exactly cant we just choose any folder on our system?
I have 3 drives a 1TB NVME, a 2TB SSD and a 4TB HDD and it takes minutes to load all apps every time I launch the app. Since CompressorX so far crashed quite often I wasted a lot of time waiting for all the apps to load.
Do you know CompactGUI? Would love to see some features like monitoring each folder/file to see which app needs to be compressed again if there was an update.

Originally posted by Rokatansky:

it took 2.5 hours and it was 1.2TB, and I have 6+(SSD and HDD combined) so... Explorer and apps stopped working during(I think) HDD scan, so I had to find other activities. but it was taking too long, so I had to cancel the process to at least start this topic.

Thanks for the heads up. That sounds like we’re in fact getting a lot of misses on the cache; I first want to look at optimizing things for your setup and also look at introducing manual app select / analyzing to avoid long start times.

I’ll track progress and provide updates in this thread.

Originally posted by Krazon:

Why exactly cant we just choose any folder on our system?
I have 3 drives a 1TB NVME, a 2TB SSD and a 4TB HDD and it takes minutes to load all apps every time I launch the app. Since CompressorX so far crashed quite often I wasted a lot of time waiting for all the apps to load.
Do you know CompactGUI? Would love to see some features like monitoring each folder/file to see which app needs to be compressed again if there was an update.

I really apologize for the inconveniences / annoyances as I work out the bugs; ideally manual folder selection will be available in the future - I avoided it for the initial release because I didn’t want end-users trying to compress every folder on their PC before making sure we could non-destructively compress games. If somehow CompressorX corrupts a game install, Steam can fix it with an integrity check. You can’t do that with important documents; eventually those guardrails will come off.

Originally posted by Andrew:

Originally posted by Krazon:

Why exactly cant we just choose any folder on our system?
I have 3 drives a 1TB NVME, a 2TB SSD and a 4TB HDD and it takes minutes to load all apps every time I launch the app. Since CompressorX so far crashed quite often I wasted a lot of time waiting for all the apps to load.
Do you know CompactGUI? Would love to see some features like monitoring each folder/file to see which app needs to be compressed again if there was an update.

I really apologize for the inconveniences / annoyances as I work out the bugs; ideally manual folder selection will be available in the future - I avoided it for the initial release because I didn’t want end-users trying to compress every folder on their PC before making sure we could non-destructively compress games. If somehow CompressorX corrupts a game install, Steam can fix it with an integrity check. You can’t do that with important documents; eventually those guardrails will come off.

No need to apologize, it's all good.
Your explanation of why you didn't implement such a feature absolutely makes sense and I'm glad that you plan to add a fool-proof version of such a feature in a future update.

Thanks for your reply and for the bug fixing so far!

Originally posted by Andrew:

Originally posted by Rokatansky:

it took 2.5 hours and it was 1.2TB, and I have 6+(SSD and HDD combined) so... Explorer and apps stopped working during(I think) HDD scan, so I had to find other activities. but it was taking too long, so I had to cancel the process to at least start this topic.

Thanks for the heads up. That sounds like we’re in fact getting a lot of misses on the cache; I first want to look at optimizing things for your setup and also look at introducing manual app select / analyzing to avoid long start times.

I’ll track progress and provide updates in this thread.

After the latest update(I think) I could start the program and it scanned my files much faster, it took just a few minutes(or even less) to scan 1tb, instead of 2 hours as before. So now scanning process was finished and I can use it. Thank you!

A simple drive selection would be great (just posted about it but deleted it when I saw this threat)

I have several SSDs and the scan was done withing 5 minutes but HDDs are pure torture, especially for large scale scanning like this, it also locks up half the system because windows sucks at managing when a drive is at max usage (boot drive is an NVMe SSD)

Hey folks. As I look into this further, I can also say in one of my test Windows Defender seems to really slow down scanning - I would suggest adding CompressorX to the exclusion list while I look for a workaround.

Originally posted by Andrew:

Hey folks. As I look into this further, I can also say in one of my test Windows Defender seems to really slow down scanning - I would suggest adding CompressorX to the exclusion list while I look for a workaround.

Your suggestion worked for me. A full scan only took 5 minutes after adding CompressorX to the Windows Defender exclusion list.

As others have suggested, a manual scan of drives would be preferable over an automatic one, as I don't want my HDD's to be scanned every time as that is what takes the most amount of scan time due to the huge size of my HDD's.

Originally posted by Wraith:

Originally posted by Andrew:

Hey folks. As I look into this further, I can also say in one of my test Windows Defender seems to really slow down scanning - I would suggest adding CompressorX to the exclusion list while I look for a workaround.

Your suggestion worked for me. A full scan only took 5 minutes after adding CompressorX to the Windows Defender exclusion list.

As others have suggested, a manual scan of drives would be preferable over an automatic one, as I don't want my HDD's to be scanned every time as that is what takes the most amount of scan time due to the huge size of my HDD's.

It will be available in the next release; I’m also working on an improved file lookup that avoids lots of reads.

I have a lot of games installed taking around 2.77TB and the app took 65~ minutes to scan all games.

This is what happened step by step:
1. I tried to compress a game that was previously compressed using Compactor. It seems CompressorX has a compatibility issue with files compressed this way because it indicated that it Failed to compress most files.
2. Afterwards, I opened compactor and decompresssed the game to fix the files failing to compress on Compressor X.
3. I switched back to CompressorX and decompressed the game too, so it could decompress the few files it compressed. No issues here.
4. I press to compress but it didn't do anything this time. Also the games list scrollbar stopped responding and couldn't click any game and I had to resort to close the app because I couldn't do anything. Video: https://imgur.com/a/xTZikLb

I thought I would just restart the app and try to compress again but It started scanning all games again! This leads me to request to some way to prevent this. Some ideas:

- Don't scan all games on startup. Just store which games have been compressed and which not and only perform a scan when you are going to compress/uncompress them.
- If that's not an option, cache the install size and the scan date. Then the app should only scan again if it is detected that the game directory has been modified past this scan date in the future.
- Less accurate and definitely not my prefered option for many reasons but you can use the Steam manifest to read the game file size.

I hope something can be done to improve this behavior. I purchased the software to test and see how it worked but unfortunately performing another scan will mean I'm out of the refund time period so I can't test the app anymore but doing something regarding this could be helpful for other people in this use case.

To improve scan times add CompressorX to the Windows Defender exclusion list. Merging this with the other thread on the topic.

Originally posted by darklinkpower:

Request to please prevent re-scanning on each startup (And reporting some issues I experienced)

I have a lot of games installed taking around 2.77TB and the app took 65~ minutes to scan all games.

This is what happened step by step:
1. I tried to compress a game that was previously compressed using Compactor. It seems CompressorX has a compatibility issue with files compressed this way because it indicated that it Failed to compress most files.
2. Afterwards, I opened compactor and decompresssed the game to fix the files failing to compress on Compressor X.
3. I switched back to CompressorX and decompressed the game too, so it could decompress the few files it compressed. No issues here.
4. I press to compress but it didn't do anything this time. Also the games list scrollbar stopped responding and couldn't click any game and I had to resort to close the app because I couldn't do anything. Video: https://imgur.com/a/xTZikLb

I thought I would just restart the app and try to compress again but It started scanning all games again! This leads me to request to some way to prevent this. Some ideas:

- Don't scan all games on startup. Just store which games have been compressed and which not and only perform a scan when you are going to compress/uncompress them.
- If that's not an option, cache the install size and the scan date. Then the app should only scan again if it is detected that the game directory has been modified past this scan date in the future.
- Less accurate and definitely not my prefered option for many reasons but you can use the Steam manifest to read the game file size.

I hope something can be done to improve this behavior. I purchased the software to test and see how it worked but unfortunately performing another scan will mean I'm out of the refund time period so I can't test the app anymore but doing something regarding this could be helpful for other people in this use case.

> 1. I tried to compress a game that was previously compressed using Compactor.


Yes, don’t mix programs. CompressorX is not compatible with any other software that compresses files on Windows. You’re going to end up corrupting the files if you keep mixing the two programs.

https://imgur.com/a/1Mq9c6D

Working on it.