FSX-MS Reason for long FSX loading or startup times shown

[VeryBumpy 272]

Spent many hours on this.

CSV file had over 5 million lines. Excel file exceeded 400mb and was 5Gig, yes gigabytes, when loaded. Was a bit painful to work with.

Hopefully this is representative to most other users and helpful in case they want to speed things up.

[HighBypass 2,339]

So... JF Traffic was the culprit!  Thanks for the hard work!

[n99wb 10]

Mr. V. Bumpy,

 

You had 9.3 minute load times?  Was that from hitting the FSX icon until the flight interface screen came up?

 

Thanks,

N99WB

[Bjoern 1,157]

Was there a previous discussion about this? If so, I could have saved you from that monster excel file by stating that yes, lots of SimObjects (especially AI) and complex add-on scenery are the single worst offenders in terms of load time. (On the hardware side, there's a penalty when not using a SSD.) ;)

Thanks for investing all that time anyway. Now I've got numbers to show if someone won't believe me. :)

[VeryBumpy 272]

Yes, 9 minutes was my worst FSX load time captured after a PC cold boot.

I run FSX with Ideal Flight 10, so with the flight plan already created within IF10, I just press the FLY button and it starts FSX then lands me in the cockpit, plane fueled, frequencies set, plan in gps, etc, all fully ready to go.

After removing many Simobjects and reducing gfx settings (my frame rates were in the low teens at KJFK) , I'm now down to about 2.5 minutes loading time, much more tolerable.

I may buy a SSD for FSX but I need to figure out how to easily transfer it over, not interested in a week's worth of time re-setting up my FSX install.

[bernd1151 5,855]

54 minutes ago, VeryBumpy said:

I may buy a SSD for FSX but I need to figure out how to easily transfer it over, not interested in a week's worth of time re-setting up my FSX install.

That's easy, I just moved from a HDD to an SSD myself. I copied everything from my HDD to the new SSD. The HDD was my D: drive. After the transformation was completed, I renamed the HDD F: and gave the new SSD the name D:   Done!

This worked for me, but of course others will have other preferences.

[joelpacheco 9]

The SSD may even come with a license for a cloning software.

[flyerkg 62]

It seems as if I missed an earlier post describing the topic. How is Excel getting this data related to number of files and load times? 

[Bjoern 1,157]

23 hours ago, VeryBumpy said:

I may buy a SSD for FSX but I need to figure out how to easily transfer it over, not interested in a week's worth of time re-setting up my FSX install.

It depends on what your add-ons require, but FSX:Steam for one, can be easily moved over to another drive. It's a different story for FSX:MS because any move will invalidate the product activation.

In both cases, you'll have to point FSX' registry entry to the new destination, but there's tools to make this quite easy*.

 

 

*https://www.tweakfs.com/store/free_tools.php

[VeryBumpy 272]

21 hours ago, flyerkg said:

It seems as if I missed an earlier post describing the topic. How is Excel getting this data related to number of files and load times? 

Process Monitor logs and exports data to .csv format. From there, it's a bunch of Excel.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

It depends on what your add-ons require, but FSX:Steam for one, can be easily moved over to another drive. It's a different story for FSX:MS because any move will invalidate the product activation.

In both cases, you'll have to point FSX' registry entry to the new destination, but there's tools to make this quite easy*.

 

 

*https://www.tweakfs.com/store/free_tools.php

Unless FSX is installed on the C: drive, you can move the FSX directory to a new SSD and rename that new drive to the old drive letter without invalidating the licensing.

Have done it several times.

[VeryBumpy 272]

18 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Unless FSX is installed on the C: drive, you can move the FSX directory to a new SSD and rename that new drive to the old drive letter without invalidating the licensing.

Have done it several times.

Thanks for the ideas and info on FSX install moving.

Not so simple in my case because in addition to FSX on my current HDD, I have 1.5T of other windows programs also on this same drive. Also, I can't really add a new SSD by itself because all my SATA ports are occupied. I'm looking at a rather major reconfig to move FSX.

[zmak 331]

7 minutes ago, VeryBumpy said:

Thanks for the ideas and info on FSX install moving.

Not so simple in my case because in addition to FSX on my current HDD, I have 1.5T of other windows programs also on this same drive. Also, I can't really add a new SSD by itself because all my SATA ports are occupied. I'm looking at a rather major reconfig to move FSX.

There are ways to attach 2 SSD per sata port . Lots of info on google

I attached 2 straight up on one cable and never had any problems