I’ve read some good threads about the size of people’s Community folders and wondered if anyone had ever noticed a direct correlation between a large directory and performance not including startup time. I use Addon Linker, so I probably have 50-70 GB “active” at any one time, and my sim is running fine - and that sound you hear is me knocking wood.
Yes, I know it’s all relative depending on the rig you have. I see a lot of scenery files for different cities around the USA and would love to load them, but they’re generally ~ 1 GB each and I was curious if anyone had noticed performance problems based on the number of GBs loaded. Obviously I could and will test this myself, but I was curious about everyone else’s experiences - especially if there was a point of no return, so to speak.
I’m not concerned with loading time - I’m retired so I can sit back and wait.
Yes I have noticed a link between the size of the Community folder and load time. So I keep mine as small as I can. I have a community bak folder where I keep the things I’m not using and drag and drop as needed. My bak folder hovers around 40g and my community folder hovers around 20g.
My Rig
Processor Intel(R) Core™ i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz 3.60 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
SanDisk SSD G5
Edition Windows 11 Pro
Version 22H2
Installed on 10/28/2022
OS build 22623.875
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22634.1000.0
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super with 8g memory
Driver 516.59
G Sync Monitor: Dell 27 Gaming Monitor - S2721DGF
HP Reverb G2
Internet Speed
230.9 Mbps download
32.5 Mbps upload
I think you may have identified one of the main contributing factors here… I would suggest that system RAM for the PC greatly influences performance with some of the add ons available. (Personally I am not seeing performance issues between a vanilla sim and a full community folder- but I have 32 GB RAM).
I am pretty sure MSFS manages add ons pretty well, only actually loading the relevant scenery into memory when one is flying in the area that requires that scenery. I suspect user defined LOD settings combined with which add ons are being used could contribute massively to performance, more than the actual size of the community folder.
Load times are definitely affected by larger community folders.
One other thing that seems to be a “feature” these days, is possibly related to performance. It appears that MSFS has recently introduced some sort of hard limit for injected “objects”, e.g. AI traffic (whether live traffic or from one of the 3rd party addons, e.g AIG or FSTL) and also injected ships/boats. I am not sure of the exact number of allowable injected “objects” but it appears to be fewer than what it was before, which may explain a reduction some people are seeing in live traffic- if there are nearby injected ships etc. I think this is also the case for 3rd party airport scenery that has lots of static “sim objects” to populate parking stands. An airport full of these can reduce the ability for other add ons to also inject “objects”.
What I do for myself is keep multiple Community Folders with different “profiles” of add-ons I like to run. I currently have 4 CF’s available and just rename the one I want to use at the time. That allows me to keep mods spread out so I don’t weigh down the current CF too much.
I have a LOT of addons (thank you flightsim.to) and for addons that are specific to a certain area, like an airport, city, etc, there’s never an issue.
With mods that are global in nature, like We Love VFR, Bijans Seasons, AI plane and boat traffic, etc, those have the highest chance of causing issues. I keep those wide reaching addons in a specific folder in Addons Linker so I can test with them on/off as needed.
But in the last year I don’t think I’ve removed an addon due to performance impacts.
System is middle of the road… Razer laptop, 10875h (8/16 core), 32Gb ram, 2080S maxq, storage are all NVMe.
But I agree with the lower posts. It doesn’t really matter to performance with regards to the QUANTITY of mods active. It’s more down to what the mods do and if they are all making stuff happen in the same view at the same time as you’re flying.
I have only a handheld PC with just 16gb ram and even with my current profile of nearly 800 items loaded (around 460gb, spread over various drives even an external USB disk for my planes and liveries) it’s not a problem. Performance only dictated by what the mods are if they are individually heavy or not. I don’t have issue with waiting longer for it to load. It’s about 5 mins I suppose. Even empty it’s 3 minutes so that’s fine by me.
I have about 700GB total of mostly free add ons from flightsim.to and purchased add ons.
But I have all my add ons organized into folders by country and I use msfs add ons linker to only link in the ones needed for the regions where I plan to fly. I could never have them all loaded at once but I do load over 300GB at a time when I load all my US/Canada add ons.
It does seem to take a longer time for the initial load of the app and maybe a little longer on flight loading too when I have a large amount of add ons loaded. But performance during the flight does not seem to be impacted, only the initial startup and load times take longer.
I highly recommend using add ons linker so you don’t have to actually move files around or rename folders.
i’ve got a single 500gb NVME specifically for flight sim. i’ve used just over 300gb of that. Most of my community folder is for immersion apps but there’s a few planes and airports + AIG planes. All my apps (volanta, GSX, FS Realistic etc) is installed to a separate drive but theres still relevant folders in the community folder
Game runs okay. smooth on DX12. Chops up where it makes sense like at night PG city with lots of traffic but fixes itself after a bit. I will say however loading up in the PMDG on DX12 is actually way quicker but idk why that is. Could be a CPU and RAM upgrade or the fact i’m actually able to use all the bus lanes on my GPU, RAM and nvme drive (previously unable to use pcie 4.0) But i digress
Personally i think unless you’re running less than 16gb of memory there shouldn’t be a huge performance difference in a FS Folder thats 700gb total vs one that’s only 300gb total. Your system is more than enough to run smoothly. CPU is a smidgen old if you ask me but if it aint broke don’t fix it
Seems to me the limit should be on texture memory as opposed to number of objects, i.e., it could keep track of how much memory the AI traffic has used. Which makes me wonder why 8K textures are so prevalent. Sure, it’s pretty, but that size uses a TON of memory. When I get textures for use for AI (airliners and such), I like to go through and reduce them to 2K in size. Most of the time I’m going to be looking at them in the distance, they don’t need to be 8K…
So, I have a question… Am I wasting my time as the software automatically downgrades the size of textures when they’re not close to me, so an 8K texture is ok as it won’t actually be used at that size unless I’m super close?
