I have 3000 addons in my folder,many payware airports and planes.
Although I use addon linker, I have all 3000 addons activated all the time.
Starting time is 5 minutes,I can live with that.
On balance it doesn’t seem to have a huge effect, really depending on how much RAM you’ve got as I believe that’s where it’s stored - any overflow would probably go to other Windows media and be slower to retrieve.
I’ve got well over a terrabyte of addons and I do know that I once forgot and tried to start the sim with it all selected and wondered why it was taking a lot longer than usual before I realised. From that you can guess that I have my addons covered by MSFS Addons Manager and have set profiles for different aircraft/scenarios so that I only load what I’m going to need on my flight. It also helps to keep things like updates under control as I’ve broken my addons into categories such as aircraft, utilities and scenery, the latter broken further into countries/airports/scenery. Takes a little setting up but saves lots of messing about later.
I just divide it by regions for scenery, and big regions. Then I have all the traffic aps bundled, and all aircraft and core apps like I love vfr bundled that I leave on all the time, and dependencies. So it’s North America, Bahamas, launch or something to that effect. Have lots of subfolders in those but usually just bulk enable them. Makes a minute or two difference, but slightly easier to diagnose any issues or figure out where something is when it updates.
This brings up a question that I’ve had for a while regarding addons that maybe someone can answer. Occasionally I look to reduce the overhead on MSFS. I have a lot of mods, but I use Addons Linker to separate their usage (using only those in the eastern US when I fly there, etc).
My question regards their impact. Is it always the case that the larger the size of the mod, the more impact it has? Even if it’s not scenery? Say a mod to clean the windshield or a plane improvement mod. 135mb vs 5gb for example. If I want to reduce the overhead, should I simply sort them by size and remove those that are larger? Is there some other way to measure their impact?
It just depends on how optimized something is. A 2GB aircraft model/textures carries a higher load than a 500mb one. Of course, for individual mods, like an airport, take more resources when it loads into view and depends on how complex it is. Other mods, like traffic, are CPU heavy to load, track, and display even if beyond visual range. Air traffic right now is probably one the biggest CPU hitting items, there’s just not much extra overhead down that single pipe of data to add in variable objects like traffic. (Now CPU heavy as in 2020 single-thread terms, not future multi-threading likely in 2024 where something that chokes the system now won’t even blip one FPS on a mult-threaded version)
Bulk texture sets and dependencies that load every time still mostly affect the initial load time.
For aircraft systems or textures it’s only when in use. And some aircraft that are as big as ‘8GB’ is the combined versions/textures for the entire aircraft file/folder, it’s only going to be the load of the one aircraft and one texture set in use.
But for add-on linker, it’s mostly loading time of the sim to divide it up, or whether or not you’re going to of course, put the add on in the game. The add ons themselves of course effect performance based on what they are when they’re in use. Whatever boxes are checked are just dumped together in the community folder.
Dividing it up gives you easier control in the grand sense, and as they add up into the hundreds makes it a lot easer to find to change/update/enable-disable. The file structure in linker is for your preferences.
I have over 300 folders in my community folder and quite a lot of marketplace addons. I’ve never noticed a drop in sim performance, but yeah, the load time is quite up there now even on NVMe drive. I usually do something else for 5min.
You can open developer console to see the real memory load of any of the loaded addons. Player´s aircraft can mean typically 1-2 GB and an airport some hundreds of MB. Remember that LODs (applicable for 3D models and textures) are going to be in place all the time, so even if you load a detailed airport or aircraft not everything will be loaded at full detail all the time. Therefore if you load 10 airports, as most likely not all of them are going to exist at the same location, the loaded details for the distant ones will be low, resulting in a moderate memory usage.
If addons are not inside view distance range they won´t be loaded so basically there´s no difference to load 10 or 100 airports for a flight, unless all of them are located really close to each other so that both are displayed at the same time. In that case you can start to face performance degradations. This is the typical situation at big cities like New York or Paris, which have multiple airports (and lot of traffic therefore which affects CPU load) in an area which is typically lower than the standard view distance.
I use Add-ons Linker also and I haven’t noticed much of a difference except when it comes to FSLTL.
FSLTL causes a big loading hit, even with the fastest nvme drives and memory on the market. Although I’m not sure if they have optimized it since I last loaded their models.
Yeah I think FSLTL is a big one. There is a mod available online to reduce the texture files. I think I reduced everything by 50%, you can choose yourself. You don’t notice it when using it I think, unless you go real close.
This is the one. Quite cumbersome but might be worth it.