Hello,
I noticed massive performance drop when having a lot of addons in the Community folder. Did some quick tests and its night and day. Is this common issue with the sim? To have 30% less FPS with large Community folder? Mine is 1TB on NVMe drive.
First 2 screens are with full Community folder
Last 2 with empty Community folder.
Empty Community folder below:
A 1TB community folder will certainly impact your start up time for the sim and I do believe that there is an upper limit on the folder size (can’t remember what it is though).
I highly recommend that you get MSFS Add-ons Linker (it’s free). That way, you can load into the sim only the add-ons that you need. This tool is specifically made to easily manage a high number of add-ons which is exactly your case.
GMTA.
With Addons Linker, you can set your Community folder to have only the addons needed for a particular flight.
I’ll add some other things I’ve found over the years that help with a healthy Community folder. Mine is about 600Gb.
First, in your specific case, your CPU seems to have the most impact when changing from a full to empty Community folder. Just based on your screenshots. My best guess is you have a “traffic mod” of some kind eating CPU. Like AIG/FSLTL or Seafront/GAIST.
More thoughts:
As others have mentioned, loading only what you need to fly with is recommended. However, I don’t do that as I tend to fly wherever the wind blows LOL, so here are some other things to check…
Check for addons that have a global impact to the sim. Some examples are: tree mods, add’l AI traffic (AIG/FSLTL/etc), AI boat mods (Seafront/GAIST), “We Love VFR” mods, Powerline mods, enhanced airport graphics, season mods (Bijan), light mods, fireworks, Probably more, just what I can think of.
For the AI traffic mods like FSLTL/AIG, they must be configured for your system, so make sure you take that into account. Even the defaults can greatly impact CPU.
Further, some aircraft mods leave the “isAirTraffic=1” setting in the aircraft.cfg file, which means you FSLTL/AIG could possibly load those large and unoptimized models. I check this now with any new aircraft I buy and set all the “isAirTraffic=0”.
While a single custom airport mod from flightsim.to or payware should not cause major performance issues, there is possibility for performance impact if the sim is loading many custom airports in the near vicinity. For example, I fly in LA a lot, but had to remove 2 payware mods for ini KLAX to perform well. The issue wasn’t necessarily ini KLAX itself, but rather the loading of all those assets in the vicinity.
Thought of another one. If you use any GPS nav mod, like TDS or PMS GTN750, this will take up CPU cycles no matter which plane you’re flying.
Hope this helps.
Thanks,
the screens were taken with no ai traffic.
I do have quite a new PC with 7800X3D and RTX 4090 so it should perform rather well.
Anyway I will keep testing.
This is well known and documented.
As has been suggested, a program like Addon Linker greatly helps resource management by only enabling the addons that are related to your flight.
Mine are broken down by
Airport
Aircraft
Aircraft Mods
Enhancements
Liveries
Scenery
Traffic
Utilities
I build a base profile for each aircraft type, which includes everything I always use with that plane.
Then I only load the Airports, scenery, etc… for the flight(s) I’m doing.
Otherwise I’d be sitting at 1.5TB in the Community folder.
I also keep track of everything on Google Sheets.
