I am experiencing a cost of time loading the sim if i have lots of addons/mods like airports or scenery photogrametry in the community folder. Anyone more have the same issue?
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Well, of course. The more stuff you load, the longer it will take; just like in every program.
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Its a well known issue. Some have suggested that it would have been better if the developers had thought about this when deciding how and when to look at the contents of the community folder. Some sort of geographical arrangement would have made sense so that the content is inspected when you set up a flight and appropriate regions loaded. Sadly that is not the way it has been configured.
Yeah, itās unfortunate. Doesnāt matter if youāre not flying in the part of the world that uses that add-on or not. MSFS will load it at startup, which makes load times longer.
Until Asobo can somehow (hopefully) fix this, itās best to just either manually remove scenery add-ons you arenāt planning on using for that session, either manually or with some kind of 3rd party manager (I believe there are a couple kicking around - I just choose the manual route). Itās just a matter of creating a folder somewhere on your drive and moving stuff you donāt need there.
A particularly bad one is when people just do a raw dump of Google photogrammetry data as their āscenery add-onā Those are really huge and not optimized at all. It takes forever to load them and also causes severe frame rate drops.
I would also suggest deleting / moving liveries you donāt use. Thereās little point in having the entire Liveries Mega Pack installed if you only use a couple of them. On that front, the Liveries Mega Pack devs are apparently creating a livery management tool that will allow you to download, install and manage liveries and install only the ones you want. I look forward to that.
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That is not really the issue.
The issue is that a LOT of the addons released by the freeware community (the vast majority) are straight Google Maps rips.
Those are nice and all (when well made) but they generate an absolutely absurd number of files, which the simulator needs to read at some point.
Just to bring an example, there is an addon for the small and quaint town of Pietrasanta in Italy. Just north of 20,000 souls.
Thatās 61,223 files. Sixty-one-THOUSAND. Thatās about 3 files per inhabitant. I better not tell you how many files big capital cities have, because I donāt want to give you nightmares.
In comparison, even ultra-detailed airports made with custom 3D models have less than 1000 files, often under 500 or less.
There was no way for Asobo to even predict google rips would be used like this, let alone knowing how many millions of files that would generate.
Mind you, not bashing the freeware community. Itās great that theyāre this active, but when you load a lot of those addons bogging your sim down with several million files, know that thereās a price to pay.
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Yep I noticed it a lot more as I added scenery. I moved everything except liveries to a backup folder and now the game loads way faster. I feel if Iām planning on flying anywhere near the scenery upgrades Iāll move it to the community folder before hand.
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Yep, thatās the same thing I do.
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There are a least two different community-made content managers on the forum, too. 
At one time I think I had about 20 gb of addons in my Community Folder (CF) and just like you had long loading times. Until recently because of this I decided to fly with an empty CF.
However, I am now currently using a freeware addon which adds short cuts to the CF and which can easily be activated or deactivated by simple ticks. You can easily create folders for addon types and subfolders within each folder.
I now permanently activate all smallish addons like airports, liveries, aircraft mods and fixes but selectively activate or deactivate heavy intensive sceneries depending upon where I am flying.
The addon is great, simple to use and FS loading times donāt seem any longer than if the CF was empty. Thankfully because of the addon long loading times are no longer an issue.
OK, hereās the links to one that I know about:
The one I am using is called āMSFS Addons Linkerā.
So, you now have a choice of at least two.
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Iāve noticed large disk I/O rates in Task Manager when msfs starts. Also Windows Defender kicks in, I assume to inspect every file, and uses almost as much cpu time as msfs.
I also know Windows Defender slows down large file transfers on my 1GB home network.
To experiment I installed Free Panda antivirus software, to replace Windows Defender. Panda does not analyse every disk transfer.
Now msfs boots up quicker, with a bigger slice of cpu time!
One caveat: one member found Zone Alarm stalled upgrades. So beware of AV software.
You can set an exclusion for MSFS folders in Windows Defender.
Cool - I never knew Windows Defender had exclusions.
Many thanks.
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Itās the catās meow! Nothing but symbolic links, to active mods, in the community folder now. Every mod user needs it or one of the alternatives. I love how I can now organize my growing mod library into folders and sub-folders.
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Yes, itās great isnāt it ?
I can now download a bunch of stuff, as much as I want, and then decide with a simple tick the addons which I want to activate or deactivate.
Really quick and simple.
Yes thatās a very good often overlooked point. I dont have anything with large amounts of imported Google stuff in my folder but I do have 35 scenery addon folders installed and the sim loads quite quickly, a few minutes at most.
Iāll bet the developers only imagined gamers(who are probably not aware of this forum) having 10-20 addons in the Community folder.
Us simmers will eventually have hundreds upon hundreds of addons installed in that folder!
Sure, a single folder for all addons is simple, but talk about an organizational nightmare. Addon managers are going to be pretty much required for most of us.