[BUG LOGGED] Long load times or when Community folder is starting to be full

Hi!
I would like to share this cause i saw that, as soon as i put more and more scenery in my community folder, the loading time is increasing drastically (7+more minutes on a black screen til the first xbox screen appears).
Any suggestion? Or this can be a fix that Asobo as to look at?
Thanks

Maybe there will be some improvement but it´s the normal behavior. More additional data means longer loading times. This was already noticeable in other sims. But hopefully there will be some fixes and improvements.

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They should consider to load scenery when FS is already started? Or this idea only moves the problem?
BTW: Great nickname!

I was going to start a thread on this yesterday but didn’t get around to it.

I, too, have noticed that it is taking much longer to load up the sim now than it did a couple of weeks ago. And then it dawned on me that this happened to me in Xplane too. In the end, I had about 1.2 TB in the Custom Scenery folder which had a great impact on my loading up times. In FS 2020 my Community Folder is now also getting fairly weighty. I suppose it makes sense really. If you are loading up more detailed scenery then it’s going to take longer to load.

In Xplane I used a product called Xorganizer where I could very easily deactivate addon scenery and plugins. This was useful for quite a few things but I could dramatically speed up loading times by deactivating some addon stuff.

So, if the increased loading times are not just a figment of my imagination and are, in fact, a very real thing would a similar tool be useful for MSFS 2020? Some addon which gives the option to deactivate addon scenery, airports and plugins?

This issue is true limitation - it was discussed also in other threads - please have a look:

Scenery Library (Content.xml) Capacity

Can we have subfolders in the Community folder?

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Ah ok! So let me understand your solution:

  • I have created new folders called “MSFSAddons” on few hard drives, then inside of them I created subfolders called “3D”, “Airports”, “Fixes”, “Repaints” etc. whatever You want.
  • after downloading any 3rd party addon I am changing its original folder name to my own - I am using this pattern of folders renaming - for example: “USA_IL_C81_Campbell_FREE” for airports, “Netherlands_3D_Bruges_Landmarks_FREE” for any 3D objects. Such naming keeps things later on in an order easy to manage, add or delete addons.
  • I am putting all new addons with renamed folder names (as above) into proper subfolder of “MSFSAddons” on the different drive depending on my free space.
  • Now the main point ! the sim is reading addons only from main Community folder, but we can put there only a shortcut to addon folder being in completely different place by mean of “symbolic link” which makes sim to see the addon as if it is in Community folder !
  • how to do it in easy way ? I am using small, great app for symbolic links creation (called LSE or Link Shell Extension ) which allows to drop sybolic links to Community folder (it is working in similar way as shortcuts)
  • how to make symbolic link ? aftere LSE installation it appears in right click drop menu - I right-click on the folder with addon - click “Pick Link Source” from drop menu, then going to main Community folder and click “Drop As” => “Symbolic Link” and ta-da ! we have nice “virtual” folder with the same name, which allows to keep in Community folder only things we want to use in the sim
  • note: I experienced huge loading time (20 minutes !) increase when my addons reached 400, so now I am putting in Community folder only symbolic links for the country or area landmarks I want to fly… unfortunately this is the only way…
    The other thing are airplanes - I do not have any new except default, so I am not sure if airplanes will work the same way, but will see…
    Hopefully this solution will help some of You to better manage Your addons, folders and drives !
    Good luck ! :+1:t2:

You put addons in a different folder (not community) and make a link from your folder to the community one for every single addon you install, right?
To do so you need an external program or we can use “links to folders” made by windows?
And this solution solve the loading problem but you’re to choose, everytime you fly, which addon load?

Thanks

Almost right :wink: First of all, default Windows shortcuts are not working, because Community folder must “see” folder as if they are inside, so only so called symbolic links are solution. This is widely described in Windows support, but has to be done manually so the best way is to use some simple application that do it in easy way - LSE app is the best I found so far.
As regards the symbolic links in Community folder - generally I keep all sceneries in different folders and drives and I only created symbolic links to all of them, but only links to airports I keep in Community folder permanently, because I see they have no big impact (in total ca. 200 links), while the rest of links to google 3D sceneries, landmarks etc I keep in temporary folder called “hangar”. From there (hangar) I move (cut & paste) only symbolic links I need to main Community folder (for example I take all 3D sceneries from Australia when I am going to fly Australia with these enhancements) - this is to avoid putting all symbolic links at once to Community folder and to kill loading time (I have ca. 450 addons now and when all were in Community folder the loading time to “press any key” screen was growing to over 20 minutes !). Hoping it will make it a bit more clear to You ! :slight_smile:

Dear devs,

I’m confident you couldn’t predict just how much support this game would get from content creators, meaning that you couldn’t know just how big the community folder would become this quickly.

Yet, it is a fact that by now we have hundreds of fantastic freeware add-ons available, and many more will come.

This means that those of us who religiously download many of them are now taking longer and longer to simply start the simulator.

The reason for that is that the sim loads ALL your addons when you start it, becoming completely unresponsive for several minutes.

I have a very fast SSD (Seagate firecuda 520) and yet with 472 items in my community folder, now MSFS takes 15-20 minutes in unresponsive status after clicking on the icon before hitting the main menu.

This, obviously needs to be addressed sooner or later, because 472 items is a fraction of the number of addons dedicated simmers have once a product matures.

I’m not sure how to solve the issue (I’m not an engineer), but I’m sure a solution has to exist. Probably the way addons are detected by the sim and loaded can be optimized by a lot, because as of now, considering my SSD’s read speeds, I have a feeling that the sim reads every single file in the community folder before it starts.

I’m quite positive anyone would agree this is sub-optimal, and probably unnecessary, so can you please take a look at it devs? :hugs:

2 Likes

This is a huuuuuge issue!

I have 40GB of addons so far and growing and it takes nearly 8 minutes for the addons to all load. Unacceptable and this needs to be optimised as best it can, especially when I had over 200GB with Prepar3d in the day and it didn’t take anywhere near this long at all.

Microsoft need to look into this. I have logged a ticket with as much info as possible that I can provide.

Let’s hope there is a hotfix as It is so unbearable I have to remove most of them from the Community folder and only have a small number of addons in there.

3 Likes

Too much work for the average person. We all need to push Microsoft on this one and log a job for each person that has an issue with it so they see it is a problem as I can’t trust they will see all our concerns about this in the forums, it’s critical to each and every one of us.

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I do believe you are right that the developers, probably with the best of intentions, utilize this method of complete read throughs of all possible data during loads with no regard to where geographically you intend to start. This is also evident in the Manual Cache area where it certainly appears that as you add more and more customization, the program has to completely read through everything you’ve done previously with each new addition or movement to recreate the entire world again with your areas marked.

What needs to happen during load is an indexing system designed for all that extraneous scenery data that says it exists in this general region of viewing and we only care about it when we have a situation where it’s appropriate. That would fit for the community folder. A simple indexing system attached to that folder would do a quick scan each time for any new additions or folders and, if they exist, a quick scan of the data in them to see what geographical areas they represent. That index then would be used to determine if that custom area needed to be loaded when starting a flight, scanned periodically during the flight to see if a user was flying into a newly defined area. Only then would that particular area be loaded.

It may require that we as users have an additional burden when adding a new community folder, that we do it through an interface instead of just copying and pasting a folder in. It would be well worth it though if the in game play was enhanced.

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With new addons and Mods going into the Community folder it now causes a very long load time to open the sim to the Welcome screen. Flight load time is OK.
What I don’t understand is that 100GB of Official folder content will load in around a minute or two but 80GB of Community folder content can take me over 7 minutes to get to the Welcome screen.
80GB of addons is nothing compared to what is to come so at this rate I can see that a couple of hundred GB of addons/mods will require at least half an hour of load time.
My times are with a NVMe. M2 disk that reads/writes at 3400MB/s so I have no idea how long it will take on a regular HDD
Can Asobo look into this?

I assume there is still plenty of room on your storage drive?

@DORRAGER
Yes room is not a problem. I have resolved my issue by creating regional Community files like US, UK/EU and AUS/Asia. I just drop the appropriate regional file into where Community folder goes and it loads much quicker being less size than the total of all 3 together.
It maybe all the dds files in the addons that cause the long loading times as I notice any addon with dds files takes a long time to Extract and to copy. The read rate of a dds files is less that 1MB/s in comparison to the read rate of other content which can be in the dozens, if not higher MB/s rate.

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I have exactly the same experience. I also used Xorganizer for X-plane and I think it would be a good idea the make Xorganizer compatible with MS2020. Perhaps and ideao to contactthe developer?

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I tested this with a stopwatch. From clicking the msfs icon to menu. First i ran the sim to ensure there will be no difference because of caching. I have some freeware airports, an airplane and livery megapack in the community folder. I also ran with a full folder twice to ensure it’s not initial initialization only.

Full: 1m49s
Empty: 1m24s
Full: 1m41s
Full: 1m42s
Empty: 1m23s

So 18-26 second difference for me. My Community folder is relatively small so i can see this becoming a problem in the future.

Hopefully they can shorten this or fix this because multiple TB scenery folders is normal for some people.

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Looking at the comments above the two of us seem to be the only ones who think that an Xorganizer for MSFS 2020 would be a great idea. Quite surprised really that the idea has no more support given how useful it was and how widely it was used in Xplane. There must be quite a few Xplane Simmers here who have used it in the past and found it indispensable. Maybe i’m overlooking something glaringly obvious here which negates its use?

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You’re not alone! i’ve Xorganizer too and it is awesome! We should ask them to implement Fs2020 too!

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Please devs imrove this.

I know there are similar topics to this one, however my specific issue is that the Initial loading times from starting the Sim to the first splash screen (press any key to continue) can take anything up to 30 minutes!!!
I have noticed that the reason for this is directly linked to the Community folder. I assume the sim is doing somehting with the Content.xml file and validating each addon every time. Regardless of what it is doing, this is placing a real limit to adding on community addons (freeware and payware). The more scenery you have, the longer it will take! I could handle this if it was just for the first load of new scenery but unfortunately it happens everytime you start up the Sim.

I know Asobo are encouraging the community to add their own scenery etc to the Sim. However this problem seriously needs to be fixed.
Please can the moderators place this post for Voting so we can get Asobo’s attention to fix this?
Thanks