I am not jumping on the beta, but yesterday I timed the start time on the stable version with 279 aircraft in hangar and about 50 or so airports. It’s 5 mins and 30 seconds, so we shall see when SU13 releases what it will be then. 
- Experiment method
I used Process Monitor Process Monitor - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn with a filter for process name and with only file operations and thread creation displayed. This is excellent because you can see what MSFS is doing and what is slow. Importantly you can see to the second very clearly when the loading of the sim started and finished even if not watching it, which makes it a lot easier. I saved the traces so I could double check unusual results.
Times are from process start to ready at the initial menu screen.
Cold starts were after a reboot then a 30-60s pause at the desktop to let the machine idle. Warm starts were after quitting the previous start and waiting 30s before starting again, without a reboot.
Many times were measured twice but always they were very consistent, within 4s, and so some combinations were only taken once. I’m only giving the lowest of any measurement pairs here.
Changes of configuration were managed using addons linker for both Community and Onestore folders. After each configuration change an untimed start was done to ensure that any cached startup work was completed before the measurement run.
System is 7800X3D X670E 64GB 3060 12GB Samsung 980 Pro 2TB 40% free space. 16GB empty rolling cache on ramdisk.
R is the current pre beta general release. B is the current SU13 beta x.14. Times in M:SS
- Results
- Base installation, only mandatory packages.
Cold R 1:55 B 1:46
Warm R 1:31 B 1:23
- Base installation plus world and city updates only.
Cold R 2:07 B 1:58
- All marketplace content installed. Includes c.120 packages extra with a mix of aircraft, scenery, airports, etc.
Cold R 3:40 B 3:30
- All marketplace + all Community content of c.450 packages. Includes navigraph and many aircraft (Fenix, Comanche+more) and a lot of airports and some scenery and utilities.
Cold R 5:49 B 5:24
- Everything plus also GSX with all services enabled but all jetways disabled.
Cold R 7:38 B 7:08
Warm R 5:09 B 4:35
- Conclusion
Beta x.14 provides a small but appreciated reduction in load times under all conditions with my configuration. The saving is roughly proportional to the total load time and is 30s in full configuration.
Also GSX is expensive in load time. From process monitor on the release version I could see that just loading all of the GSX services overrides took exactly 60s.
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In addition to the timings I also observed a behaviour difference which clearly shows there have been some underlying changes to package management.
Prior to beta when updating Onestore content in the content manager (includes both mandatory and marketplace) MSFS would delete the symlink used by addons linker and create each package in a new directory. Thus after each update I would remove all links from addon manager and manually move the new directories to the external location where I keep them.
Post beta this no longer happens. Instead MSFS follows the symlink and updates the packages directly in the external location, which means I can no longer see what was updated and can’t manually backup old versions. But it does reduce manual steps after updates so has its advantages.
1 Like
Well I’ve given up. I’ve tried everything MS suggested and forum fix it topics and once again I am downloading the FS from scratch. At this juncture it is apparent that MS is not fixing this issue that everybody is experiencing so I bailed out to XPlane 12. There are differences but at least this sim works. Such a sad state of affairs for MSFS 2020. I am prepairing myself for a disapointment in the upcoming release of MSFS 2024. They should offer it free for all current owners of MSFS 2020 as an apology for breaking this sim. SMH!
All good for me:
MSFS start in 2.30 minutes from Steam menu (with 68 GB in my Community folder).
Loading flight from menu game, ± 35 seconds.
7950X3D, RTX4090, 64 RAM DDR5, 2T SSD pcie5.0
Beta version .14
Curious to know how many of you got this reply from MS in reporting a bug?:
Support (Microsoft Flight Simulator)
Sep 5, 2023, 09:47 GMT+2
Hi Don,
This issue is logged in our internal bug tracker and being investigated. We will only contact you if we need more information.
What’s next?
Bugs and issues that have been successfully reproduced by QA will be categorized and prioritized—game-breaking bugs will receive the highest priority, while middle-of-the-road and cosmetic bugs are prioritized based on reproduction and the number of times reported.
When will you fix this issue?
To know when a bug has been fixed, please refer to the Release notes. Additionally, we publish
Weekly Development Updates where players can find updates on a few of the most popular bugs currently being discussed.
Why are you closing my ticket?
The status of your ticket doesn’t reflect the status of the bug in our internal tracker and in-game.
Can you give me access to your internal tracker?
Players cannot access the internal development tracker. However, players can freely access the list of bugs and feedback already tracked or under investigation on the forums. Check the tag to know the status of a bug.
What is the meaning of the tags on the forums?
Please see below:
A curious mind wants to know…
I lost track of how many times I downloaded a fresh install of MSFS 2020 and I wonder how many of you have done all the tips and landed up downloading a fresh install once again. What is really bad is the amount of time it takes to complete a download and install. Sorry about being a bit bitchey but this ■■■■ is getting old. Rant over now…
But fo ALL of us, the simple trick is:
Stay away from Betas …
or accept the pain
2 Likes
Not participating in a BETA is only delaying the issue for all of us, not solving it
I can confirm it’s much better in 1.34.14 than in 1.34.10.
I again compared my load times and found the load time increase from my 3 problematic packages has dropped from several minutes to ~35 seconds. I think that’s still too much tbh though, as these packages aren’t big at all in terms of GB, and should, from comparisons to similarly sized unproblematic packages, not make any noticeable impact in loading times at all. However that is still the case with 35s increase.
I finally updated this PC that I’d been doing the vast amount of my beta testing on.
With 1.34.15.0, I seem to have lost some load time. I’m now up to 06:18. That’s a pretty big loss from 05:00 in the previous version.
I just retimed .15 with my full cold start at 7:20 where with .14 I was seeing 7:08-7:10. That difference is small enough it could be be noise.
1 Like
Samsung 970 EVO 4Tb
Not necessarily longer loading times, but a few crashes (just silently closing the startup window) which I never had before.
Also once while zooming in on the world map.
One was even so bad, that I had a complete screen freeze for more than a minute (did a hard reboot to get out)
Overall, poor performance (in VR).
openXRtoolkit shows GPU has lots of room (turned down some textures) but CPU constantly in overload.
(Using exact same settings as with official SU12 release)
Also tried DX12, which seems to use less VRAM than before, but eventually still passing max VRAM, and grinding.
3080TI / i9-1100K
Just to confirm seeing normal load times in .16.
Same here.
So it’s great that this problem is resolved but it’s also kind of worrying that Asobo admitted in today’s dev livestream that they didn’t ever repoduce or fix this problem and that it just went away by itself. That doesn’t inspire me with confidence that it won’t come back and bite us again.
6 Likes
Closed as fixed in Sim Update 13: Release Notes - Sim Update 13 [1.34.16.0] Available Now