Android: Loading assets from PCK is x8-10 slower than from APK

[h1v9]

Tested versions

• Reproducible on 4.5beta5

System information

Pixel 9A - Android 15

Issue description

As the title says loading assets from PCK files is almost 10 times slower than loading directly from the APK.
On the same export of the example platformer project splitting the assets into a PCK slows down loading time from:
loading time: 0.216000 secs
to:
loading time: 1.760000 secs

On a different project from the attached MRP it can take up to 8 seconds to load a single model from a PCK.
I don't know if this is expected, seems excessively slow to me.
Not sure if this is related to #102998

Steps to reproduce

• Export the assets in a PCK (making sure not to include them in the APK)
• Load the PCK with ProjectSettings.load_resource_pack
• Play

Minimal reproduction project (MRP)

The attached project is already setup with the 3 necessary export profiles and a script to load the PCK from /storage/emulated/0/platformer.pck.
You might have to restart the game after granting permissions for it to work
platformer_slow_pck.zip

[bruvzg]

Not sure if this is related to #102998

Unlikely related, it's about loading slow loading of patch PCK on top of APK cause by APK file system (FileAccessAndroid). And in your case, it's loading pack from an external source (FileAccessFilesystemJAndroid).

[syntaxerror247]

On the same export of the example platformer project splitting the assets into a PCK slows down loading time from:
loading time: 0.216000 secs
to:
loading time: 1.760000 secs

Is this slowdown happened in 4.5 beta5, or is it same previous versions?

[h1v9]

On the same export of the example platformer project splitting the assets into a PCK slows down loading time from:
loading time: 0.216000 secs
to:
loading time: 1.760000 secs

Is this slowdown happened in 4.5 beta5, or is it same previous versions?

Same issue on 4.4.1
loading time: 2.016000 secs

[AThousandShips]

Sounds like:

• Loading resources from PCK is 5-10x slower in Android export #105852

[h1v9]

Sounds like:

• Loading resources from PCK is 5-10x slower in Android export #105852

Interesting.
The user says to put this in build.gradle

    androidResources {
        noCompress += "pck"
    }

But pck files are not built with gradle, how can this help?

[bruvzg]

The user says to put this in build.gradle

This will only do something if PCK is inside APK. And I think in the current 4.5 beta, PCK is already in no-compress list by default.

[h1v9]

I had a quick look with a profiler and the slowest calls seem to be ResourceLoaderBinary::load() first and ResourceLoaderBinary::open() second. With Object::set() and ResourceLoaderBinary::parse_variant() taking most of ResourceLoaderBinary::load()'s time.
It also looks like the number of loaded files affects the speed more than the size of the loaded files.