This is where I end up on a sunday morning at 8am local time after deleting the rolling cache, launching MSFS (the client created a Report-loading.toml file because it recognized slow load times), then trying to access the Jet Engine Certification and waiting a long time.
My current working theory is that it could be my ISP’s fault (Deutsche Telekom). see:
I was watching network traffic and the impression I got is that the client seems pretty robust during initial load, but if it encounters some problem streaming content, it likes to stall, and once it’s stalled, it rarely seems to recover (or, at least, it takes a long time to recover).
Okay, if the peering-fu between my ISP and Microsoft’s CDN (is the CDN part of Azure?) is weak, maybe circumventing that bottleneck might help. “Cloudflare WARP” promises to do that. It’s going to add an extra hop to the connection, but if neither the link between my ISP and Cloudflare nor the link between Cloudflare and Microsoft is bottlenecked, the net result might be faster and more reliable.
Stand by.
Seven minutes later: I deleted the rolling cache, the client took five minutes to load, it didn’t create a Report-loading.toml this time, every step on the way to the certification was much faster and the scenario itself loaded within a few seconds. I could exit the client properly instead of having to kill the process.
Could have been a fluke. [edit: it was, see my next post below] Let’s test without CF Warp once more. Delete rolling cache, disable CF Warp, fire up MSFS. The client takes significantly longer to load, it takes a long time of staring at loading screens to get to the Jet Engine Rating scenario, and instead of the Vision Jet, I get “Bandwidth too low”, AIRCRAFT_MODEL_NOT_FOUND and scenery that isn’t loading.
Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of Cloudflare, not at all. In my job I had to deal with their support (as a paying customer) and my experience was sub-par, I also have issues with their service from a privacy perspective (just too much of the net relies on them). But judging from this anecdotal evidence, MSFS appears to work better for me when I’m using their “pseudo-VPN”. And it appears to be free.
I’m not sure who to blame, Microsoft or my ISP (Deutsche Telekom). As a paying customer of both, I can be angry at both. I know that, at least historically, Deutsche Telekom liked to hold their customers hostage to get favorable peering arrangements. But I can also see the point that service providers like Microsoft need to shoulder part of the burden of maintaining the network infrastructure.
Well, I’ve got my workaround, I’m happy for now. I’ll use my privilege as OP and tag this as (my) solution.
My regards to @Senchay6131 for pointing out that CF Warp worked for him: