!SOLVED! Performance Issues in 3.27. Slow loading times when joining others hideouts/maps

!SOLVED! Solution at the end of the post.

I just wanted to share my experience with the 3.27 patch so far. Overall, I’m enjoying the league itself and I'm having a lot of fun playing. However, I’ve run into a major issue that’s been frustrating my gameplay and it's loading times when joining other peoples hideouts and maps.

Before the 3.27 patch I never had these issues, even though my PC is old. Its always run Path of Exile pretty solidly. But since the patch whenever I try to join someone elses hideout or enter a map with other players, the load time is ridiculously long. This has started to disrupt the experience.
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PC speccs:

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40 GHz
Installed RAM: 12.0 GB
Storage: 932 GB HDD Samsung HD103SJ & 112 GB SSD Corsair Force 3 SSD (Game is installed on SSD)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (976 MB)
Windows 10 home
System Type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Troubleshooting steps I've taken:

-Uninstalled the PoE Launcher and reinstalled via Steam, this didn’t resolve the issue.

-Uninstalled both the Steam and PoE versions completely and then reinstalled again with the original PoE launcher, but the slow loading times still persist.

-Increased shader cache size in NVIDIA control panel, this helped with general load times, but didn’t improve the load time issue when joining other players hideouts/maps specifically.

-Adjusted all in game settings to low, except for textures, which is set to medium since that setting can’t be changed. - this didn't solve the problem.

-Updated to the latest NVIDIA drivers. - this didn't solve it.

-Played around with NVIDIA control panel to try and put everything on "maximum performance only" and to match the same settings as in game - hasn't changed anything.

-Switching between DirectX 11, Vulkan and DirectX 12 - Did not resolve the issue, but I started to notice visual defects on DirectX 12 & Vulkan. Screen going black, monsters not visually appearing, spells not showing.

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Is there something about patch 3.27 that could have caused changes to how loading times work? or is it purely a hardware issue?

Any help or insights would be much appreciated! Thanks

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SOLUTION:

After trying multiple troubleshooting steps without success I managed to resolve the issue by adjusting the page file settings on my SSD (the drive where the game is installed).

Initially Windows had it set to automatically manage the page file, so instead I manually increased the size of the page file, this allowed the game to have more available virtual memory which in turn improved the loading times when joining others.

I went into System Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory.

I unchecked the box for "automatically manage paging file size for all drives" and selected custom size.

I set both the initial size and maximum size to higher values (the exact values depend on your own systems available memory)

I applied the changes and restarted my computer.

After making these adjustments the loading times when entering other players hideouts and maps drastically improved.

The frustration from long loading times is no longer an issue.

This adjustment seems to have fixed the problem at least for me. I hope it might help others who are experiencing similar issues.

Solution in orignal post.

About virtual memory.

According to System information i have Total virtual memory of 22,3gb and avail. virtual memory 7,11gb.

In the virtual memory changes, where I'm inputting a custom size. How do I go about this when inputting numbers for Initial size and Maximum size. Thanks

"I set both the initial size and maximum size to higher values (the exact values depend on your own systems available memory)"

Well common man what did you set it to? I have 32 gig of ram and as there are no values in the boxes already to go off and it doesn't tell you what the auto managed settings were using I have no clue what I should change it too.

almost everyone is going to have either 16, 32 or 64 gigs of ram so why not give some suggested values for each one?