Every time you cast Find Familiar or otherwise summon temporary characters, the game creates ~150 database entries that stay behind in the save file after the summon is destroyed.

When loading in Honour mode, or when loading saves from a previous game version in standard difficulties, the game runs a very inefficient database merge operation that can take minutes to complete when bloated by these left-behind entries.

This mod looks for database entries referencing characters that don't exist anymore and deletes them, which speeds up later operations. For my Honour mode Echo Knight character late in Act 1, it reduced load times by around 2 minutes 1:35 in Patch 6. It also seems to help with overall performance later in the game.

Still relevant in Patch 6

Cleanup runs during the loading screen. To avoid this being too annoying it will bail out when taking too long, to be continued when loading a later save. Barely any time is spent on cleanup when loading saves from before the mod was installed, so to see immediate results you will need to save+load after installing (or use the No Timeout version.)

Once completed, deleting the newly added entries from a normal session typically takes fractions of a second.

Information about the cleanup is printed to the Script Extender console/log.


Alternate Version

The quickest way to get to a clean state is to use the No Timeout version available under optional files.
If you have very long loading times I'd recommend starting with the No Timeout version; load, (have a coffee break), save, then switch to the default version.


Uninstalling

This mod can safely be uninstalled at any time, but obviously the already-deleted database entries won't come back.
So... use at your own risk and hope I didn't mess up!


Credits

Thanks to Norbyte and Focus for helping me figure out what's going on!