P3D5 slow start (lot of addons)

[vl1 11]

I have around 500 payware airports, the sim was starting in a steady pace and normal time, but now i switch more and more airports from scenery.cfg entries  to add-on.xml system, and I noticed that p3d5 takes longer to fire up. Longer and longer.

Maybe if the scenery has only one internal folder it is prudent to keep it as a scenery.cfg entry?

[BerndB 349]

yes, it is noticed and mentioned by other users already, that the xml method of add-on activation slows down the loading of P3D dramatically. Especially the scenery database is impacted. The reason for this may lies in two causes. One is the managing of the scenerylayering of xml layers and legacy layering by the scenery.cfg. The Sim need to go thru all add-on xmls, scanning their parameter and put them into order. The other reason lies in the spreaded data architecture wich follows the Windows structure, where the Program has to look into several different location to find all nessecary piece of data, roaming folder, documents folder, program data folder, root folder and then go into all different folders a scenery contains of (scenery, texture, scripts, etc)

For developers this is the true horror, when you need to start the Sim about 30 times a day, wasting your time while waiting for the Sim got loaded.

[vl1 11]

Thank you for this detailed explanation!

[vl1 11]

I gave your answer a thought for some time, and have some thing to discuss.

Basically I would gladly move most of sceneries to scenery.cfg, but if only one effect goes with the scenery you will need to put them all to one p3d/effects folder. There if you need to delete something or update, you will never what to remove. Therefore you will have, in some time, tons of unneeded fx files.

 

On the other hand...

Will it not be prudent to completely get rid of scenery cfg entries? I mean except for those several default ones?

[Bob Scott 7,719]

I use the Lorby-SI P3D Addon Manager to put sceneries into regional groupings, and I disable the regional groups I'm not flying in at the time.  Speeds up loading significantly.

[vl1 11]

2 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

I use the Lorby-SI P3D Addon Manager to put sceneries into regional groupings, and I disable the regional groups I'm not flying in at the time.  Speeds up loading significantly.

not my case. I am thinking about getting rid of scenery.cfg but 500 xml files to create - too much work

[Bob Scott 7,719]

13 minutes ago, vl1 said:

not my case. I am thinking about getting rid of scenery.cfg but 500 xml files to create - too much work

The addon manager also makes fairly quick work out of converting a scenery entry to xml.

That said, I have about 350 add-on sceneries in P3Dv5, and the majority of them came already configured for xml, as that's been the LM-preferred method since p3dv4 came out over 5 years ago.  500 sceneries in the scenery.cfg is pretty unusual these days--are those FSX/32-bit P3D scenery conversions?

[vl1 11]

1 minute ago, Bob Scott said:

The addon manager also makes fairly quick work out of converting a scenery entry to xml.

That said, I have about 350 add-on sceneries in P3Dv5, and the majority of them came already configured for xml, as that's been the LM-preferred method since p3dv4 came out over 5 years ago.  500 sceneries in the scenery.cfg is pretty unusual these days--are those FSX/32-bit P3D scenery conversions?

yes they are, cause in total i have 582)))

can you pinpoint me on how to create add-on.xmls in P3DAddonOrganizer?
thanx

[Bob Scott 7,719]

38 minutes ago, vl1 said:

yes they are, cause in total i have 582)))

can you pinpoint me on how to create add-on.xmls in P3DAddonOrganizer?
thanx

Go to the "Scenery" tab, select the scenery layer to be converted, click the "edit scenery" button, and then click "Move to add-on.xml"

[BerndB 349]

4 hours ago, vl1 said:

I gave your answer a thought for some time, and have some thing to discuss.

Me myself i have a mixture of scenery using scenery.cfg and other which use xml. My loading time is still acceptable and i have not planned to move everything to one or the other corner. In my opinion it could turn out as a bad idea, to move everything to the legacy scenery.cfg method. This new file structures with xml were introduced when MS it was needed to cope with the new file structures of Windows 7 and 10. This could give a hint, that this will be more and more the way to go, because Windows is setting the rules at those points. This would mean, at least you would have to swim against the current constantly, by ignoring this. 

On the other hand i think performance issues like loading times, stutters or things like this, which depend on the more complex file stuctures, will step into the background over the time because of much more faster hardware like PCIe 5.0 SSD´s, Motherboards and the next generation of MT-CPU´s (Intel 13th gen. CPU´s i. ex.) whose threads are dedicated to exact increase the speed of the file loading, caching and handling. 

There is no general "right or wrong". It really depends on your setup and preferences. If you don´t own a more or less High-end PC, it´s may be much more effective not to use the xml method for add-on scenery as a compromise. My own Rig is powerfull, but even not "High-End" compared to the actual hardware. My SIM is running smooth and very stable (i usually sitting in my homecockpit for 6 or 8 hours, flying short and mid-range legs within Europe). Well, it takes about 2 to 3 minutes to fire up the SIM. Imagine what would it be on a PC with an I9-13000 + RTX 4090 + PCIe 5.0 SSD with at least 15.000 MByte read and write per second.

At the Moment it seems the xml file structures are getting more and more the "standard" and hardware will catch up to lean the overall latency.

[Dave_YVR 972]

 The time difference after disabling masses of sceneries is often only a few seconds in load times not including the sim having to reindex on its next start. Having to configure the sceneries to disable before that probably makes the overall  times longer than if you just left them alone.

 

[Patco Lch 1,465]

This is interesting. I have a midrange Aurora R6. It takes close to 15 minutes for my system to start P3DV5. My addons are a mixture of .XML and scenery .cfg flies. I might shorten that time significantly by changing them all to .cfg files?  I have tried disabling all sceneries except the ones for a particular session but that didn't make a noticeable difference. 

[vl1 11]

15 minutes??? My waiting time is +-3 and I ain't happy, but have 600 sceneries and 1500 airlines installed

[Patco Lch 1,465]

1 hour ago, vl1 said:

15 minutes??? My waiting time is +-3 and I ain't happy, but have 600 sceneries and 1500 airlines installed

LOL. Count your blessings my friend. Maybe you don't have an issue after all.🙂

Edited September 25, 2022 by Patco Lch

[vadriver 247]

slightly off topic ........ but my "quirky" is that addons.cfg scenery stutters way  more than scenery.cfg in my modest setup, though both giving good performance loading.

i am still not sure if it's the former's scenery at fault or the apparent complexity of addon.cfg loading/rendering ..... on my setup at least.

ISS's WSSS is a case in point ...... heaps of script, effects & animations whilst similarly complex WFSS's VHHH & ZSPD installed as scenery.cfg are fine.

during a stutter, i will see the rendering core drop to 20% whilst most other cores spike from 25 to 70% ...... seemingly finding / calculating the required render as the scenery changes.

Edited September 26, 2022 by vadriver