I’ve gone to start up the sim 4 or 5 times today and every time it has taken at least 20 minutes to load. Sometimes up to 30 minutes. Is anyone else having this issue?
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Sometimes mine loads quicker than others but never more than 3 mins at the most…Upto 30 mins is madness lol, Iv never heard of 30 min loading times before
You may want to check ya task manager see if anything is eating up your cpu or ram
As from today 8 Dec 21, It’s taking 20+ minutes. I’ve killed it and restarted. Rebooted the PC.
Checking for updates takes 9minutes (2ms ping and 180Mb/s download line speed).
Then loading takes forever. It gets stuck with the little progress bar all the way over, no more black - but seems to be a small piece of dark blue. Like it’s done but not fully done… It’s ridiculous. So frustrating how unstable and full of issues the game seems to be. I’m so disappointed. At the moment my game is not playable.
I feel your pain. I just started playing it today and the initial load time was 23 minutes. I then selected a flight and during load time it crashed to desktop. All that time spent for nothing. I think I’m going to go ahead and install the new nvidia driver since it’s crashing anyway to see if it works. Might as well.
I’m sorry but I physicaly laughed when I read this sentence. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because I can’t count how many times something simlar has happened to me. Now I don’t have these rediculus load times that you’re describing but I understand the frustration this would cause.
On the flip side though, I’m having trouble shutting down a flight. I think this is a network problem as well. After a flight when I select to go back to the main menu the sim hangs preventing me from starting a new flight. It just started a few days ago where the progress bar just hangs near completion. I’ve waited over 10 minutes one time without joy so now when it hangs I just use the task manager to quit the game and restart. That’s quicker than waiting for more than 10 minutes. Funny that my flight does show up in the log book.
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So wait, maybe it’s not something crazy going on with my installation lol. I’ve tried starting it twice tonight and after at least 20 minutes I Ctl-Alt-Del out of MSFS 2020 since the blue bar quit moving. It’s never done this in the 16 months since I’ve been playing it. I’ll try letting it go even longer but my patience starts running out after 20 minutes of nothing happening. Uggh!
I did purchase a few new mods yesterday, an airport and a cityscape, but that’s the only thing different. I know add-ons from the marketplace can have an effect on initial load time but 20 to 30 minutes is a bit excessive I think. 
Sim Update 5 loaded the quickest for me I would say under a minute. Sim Update 7, I think is getting on for 3 minutes. It doesn’t help by sitting on the checking for updates page for 30 seconds before continuing. It can’t even complain about disk access speed because most of the 3 minutes there is little to no disk access.
You can make sure that AV is disabled or at the very least excluding the MSFS folders.
There is a fair bit of network traffic when its loading, not in volume so faster internet doesn’t help but lots in terms of individual requests.
I think more than 30s from an ssd is a bit unacceptable these days especially as at the end of it all its really done is load a menu. You load a flight and its another 90 seconds before you get in the plane.
Its like having a tape drive 8 bit micro all over again.
Has anybody found a solution? Now this insane loading times showed up on my installation. Checking for updates alone takes over 5 minutes. Completely emptying the community folder does not change anything.
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Have a look at your “BuilderLogError.txt”. Maybe you can then isolate the problem.
You can find the “BuilderLogError.txt” here:
C:\Users\*Username*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\
It has gotten so annoying time consuming to somehow finally get into the main menu that watching at least three Netflix episodes of The Witcher before finally hearing the flight sim main menu music in the background (at the end of episode 4), has become “normal” 
Ok this was maybe a little bit too sarcastic, but the waiting time is really so annoying that I have begun watching YouTube videos while the flight sim is loading, it takes sometimes five or even ten minutes till being on the runway whenever launching the sim.
If I could improve one thing in the flight sim: It should go into the main menu like every other game or program - in about five to ten seconds 
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@AlexE75 Thank you, I will have a look at that.
@GamingCat2130 We are talking about 20 - 30 minutes. I would be glad to be on the runway after 5 minutes or so. That was my normal til 2 days ago.
Startup time for the sim takes usually a couple of minutes for me. In the meantime i mostly replying topics on this forum 
When pressing the fly button, i should be on the runway in max 5 minutes, if not its alt-F4 for me and i will try it again. So far this only (frequently) happening with the FBWa320. rest of the planes (addon, like dc6 or default) are ready within 2- max 3 minutes.
I have a low range pc and it takes upto 5 mins to load to menu screen
I use Add on Linker to selectively load scenery for my intended flight.If I didnt , I bet it would take 30 mins to load all my purchased scenery
I posted separately about MSFS never (or at least not until I give up waiting) finishing the startup process, when the Installation Manager doesn’t even appear for checking for updates. This happens every first time I start MSFS. I have to close and restart and then it proceeds normally (about 5 minutes to main page). I also use MS Addons Linker to start, but it is the same just clicking on the desktop MSFS icon/button. I have a very robust PC build.
Have you checked Resource Monitor for standby memory - mine was in the gigs…
Here’s a handy video to set up a task to clean it
How To REDUCE FPS Stuttering and FIX LOW Performance on ANY PC with this SETTING! MORE FPS 
- YouTube
Just for documentation: I had to unsubscribe from the XBox Insider Program and uninstall, than reinstall the XBox App. That solved the extremely long loading times. What didn’t work was repairing, resetting, reinstalling MSFS, reinstalling Windows and MSFS…at least I have very slim and healthy installation now.
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