So Long to Start. Want fly 1hour, wait to main screen 15 mins

Are you launching the sim with a -fastlaunch argument? That eliminates the partner logo animations and starts loading where you first see scenery screenshots.

No. I’m not. How does one do that?

On Steam, just add it to the launch arguments for FS2020. A little more involved for Microsoft store but not hard. Search and ye shall find. :+1:

For MS store you can just create a new shortcut on the desktop to:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App "-FastLaunch"
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Resetting the cache helped. Thanks.

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Setting the page file to 8gb helped. Thanks. Do you know why though? I have 32gb of ram and never run out in my usage. Would like to know, if you do. :blush:

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Well, with the description of the page file it may be easy for us to interpret that it is only utilized when physical memory is exhausted because it (can) and (will) be, though this isn’t in no way stating that the page file is utilized in this fashion only. There are programs like Photoshop and MSFS, as well as other games that use a lot of physical memory that manage that through the page file no matter how much physical memory you have. PS is a little different for it writes its own scratch disk, I’ve had it grow to over 100GB… Back in windows 7 days if you had a lot of physical memory you could get away with not having a page file for merely how programs were designed. That has changed in our Windows 10 times :smiley:

Some programs and games will just flat out crash with little to no page file present!

I suspect that may be the way many may do in some instances. People that have even 64GB of ram or more, end up disabling page file thinking they have plenty of ram and then run into issues of stability or like in this instance slow loading times.

I have 32GB of ram as well but then I take it to the extreme with OS on one SSD, MSFS on another SSD, 30GB Rolling Cache on another SSD, 20GB Page File on another SSD. :laughing:

It’s a bit extreme and not plausible for everyone but works a treat for me.

8GB page file is actually minimal. You could go even higher, just not sure what kind of storage space you have!

Happy Landings!

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Thank you so much for this wonderful, clear and articulate explanation. It has opened my eyes. I was one of those who would actually disable page file. Of course in this instance it was set to automatic. I originally did set up a separate SSD for the rolling cache but found there to be no improvement so moved it to the same one, which is a 1tb 970 Evo plus.

Anyhow. Thankfully it’s now working properly. Which is a big relief. It was a bummer having to spend 20 minutes of the one hour I usually sit for, just to load.

Thank you again. Much appreciated.

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Very welcome, taken to heart! Glad it is working better for you now!

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I’m having similar issues to OP. Could you explain how to do this Pagefile fix? I’m not the most computer literate so I’m not sure what I should try here. Thanks!

Follow this:

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Are you sure those programs are accessing the system pagefile, though? It’s very bad form for applications to have access to and be able to modify system files.That would probably be a huge security issue since that’s what a lot of malware wants to do — get access to system files and memory areas. That would also really complicate Windows being able to manage it since you could then have more than one totally unrelated process wanting to access the file at the same time which would probably slow both down. MSFS2020 has a pagefile of sorts in the rolling cache but that is a different file in a different location than pagefile.sys. Are you referring to that?

I’m not saying they don’t do it since this is the first I’ve heard that virtual memory is shared that way, but it would surprise me and have me thinking even less of Windows. :grin:

Thanks. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), changing the page file did nothing to improve my situation, and actually made things worse. The whole computer is laggy, and menus and selections inside MSFS (before I even load a flight) are laggy and unusable.

Here are some good reads. :slight_smile:

Which Applications using Page File and how much?

How to Manage Virtual Memory Pagefile in Windows 10 Published by Shawn Brink

I had the same issue and found that the main cause for slow starts (>10min) were the airports purchased in the MS Store. Remove those and test again. Without those my time got down to 3:30min.
To test I purchased several airports again but this time outside of MS. Although the same airports they did not add to the starting time in a measurable amount (this time installed in Community).

My theory is that this is caused by the MS Store DRM encryption which makes loading at startup very slow. This can be monitored by the Sysinternal Process Monitor Tool.

For me it is clear never to purchase from the MS Store again.

Btw. the encryption also prevents tools like Little Navmap to be able to read airport data to generate airport maps. This is not a problem when purchased outside of MS.

My sim also takes ages to load (ca. 15 - 20 min) after the latest mandatory update. I tried the above mentioned measures, but nothing helped. Hope they will issue a fix for this.

Thank you so much, this works like a charm! My managed pagefile was 4GB, I changed it now to 16GB and startup is 1:30 and load a flight between 1:00-1:20 instead of 4-5 mins!

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Glad to hear! Bravo! :wink:

Thanks for your eplanation, I also have 32gb of ram, and 16gb on the graphic card. I did the same as you sugested, and it is a lot faster at start up. Sometimes it takes about 4 to 5 min. That is acceptable.

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