UESP Forums

So, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed this... if I store too many items in a container, transferring items gets really slow sometimes. This seems to be worst with armor/apparel.

As background, when I get overburdened, I generally don't always immediately sell things off. Usually I go out questing a bit until I'm overburdened, and then head home and unload some stuff into storage. I tell myself that I'm gonna get around to sorting through things, and figure out what's something I might want to use, what's ready to sell in its current state, and what items I should temper/enchant before selling to maximize my income. But then I decide that going on more quests is more fun than doing inventory, so I head out, gain a bunch more loot, and lather, rinse, repeat.

As a result I have in storage hundreds of weapons, and hundreds of pieces of armor and shields and whatnot, spread among around a dozen containers in my house.

Now, for certain categories of items, this isn't much of a problem -- the container with 100 books in it functions okay, as does the container with over 1000 alchemy ingredients.

But I have problems with other items, and I suspect the problem is worst with armor and the like. I have my armor split up among a number of containers. One container only contains enchanted light armor/apparel, only (at last count) 80 or so items. Adding or removing items from this container takes about 7 seconds per item. While that may not sound like much, when you click on the button, and nothing happens for 7 seconds, it seems like a long time. And it adds up if I want to move a few dozen items around.

I'm suspecting this is a side effect of the sorting system that Skyrim uses for apparel.

I minored in Computer Science in college, including a class on algorithms, which covered a lot of sorting algorithms. So, I'm pretty opinionated on the topic.

This has probably already been discussed previously in this forum, but I haven't figured out the search terms to find any previous discussions.

New development:

When I reported this, my character was wearing light armor, and had a high light-armor skill and a number of perks in the light armor skill tree. The problem would occur when I was looking at one of the containers full of light armor, or if I looked at one of the containers full of heavy armor.

Recently, my light armor skill hit 100, so I decided to legendary it, and switch over to heavy armor. A little bit later, I went to one of my armor containers to add a few newly acquired items, and discovered that the problem had pretty much gone away. Moving an item into the container, which previously had taken around 7 seconds, now happens in less than a second. I haven't gotten around to cleaning out the containers; they're just as over-full as they've ever been -- the only thing that's changed is my armor choice, and the change in my skill points.

I wonder what's changed here. Is it something specific to the type of armor I was wearing, or was some problem triggered by one of the perks I had active (presumably in the light-armor skill tree) and the problem went away when the perk went away?