...take a long, long time to boot after installing the majority of models and repaints from AIG?

We're talking 15+ minutes this morning before I had to turn it off and go to work.

I want to stress that I don't mind how long it takes to boot, just as long as it does 🤞👌

@verbal, no it isn’t. Mine presents the scenario screen within a minute. Make sure you’re running P3D in admin mode.

My installation also needs ca. 15 mins to present the scenario screen. Running everything on SSDs, but SATA, not NVMe. All AIG flightplans installed, plus hundreds of scenery add-ons. I use P4AO to deactivate those I don't need, but I suspect P3D scans the xml files anyway. Without any add-ons, it's under a minute for me also.

I don’t use AIG but there are hundreds of sceneries. On NVMe it takes around 5-7 minutes. Making exemptions of all folders whith add ons plus p3d main folder in Windows Defender does speed things up considerably but still it takes some time. Without add ons it loads instantly.

Don't forget to defrag your hard drive it's installed on if on an HDD.  I find even if my drive is only lightly fragmented, it can dramatically slow down load times with all the scenery and everything else I have.

37 minutes ago, Kalnon said:

Don't forget to defrag your hard drive it's installed on if on an HDD.  I find even if my drive is only lightly fragmented, it can dramatically slow down load times with all the scenery and everything else I have.

It’s interesting that @verbal hasn’t included his storage in his signature. With such a good system you would expect P3D and all associated software to be installed on an M2 SSD.

I think that P3Dv4 takes maybe 3 minutes to load after I have first booted up the PC, but subsequent loads are quicker than that. This is with a 1TB NVMe M2 drive.

Remember to untick sceneries that u not use - why sim has to load America or Asia if u plan to fly Europe? - all redundant entries matters

Edited March 3, 20233 yr by Beardyman

5 minutes ago, Beardyman said:

Remember to untick sceneries that u not use - why sim has to load America or Asia if u plan to fly Europe? - all redundant entries matters

I’ve never bothered doing that in all the years I’ve used the various versions of ESP. I’m not convinced it makes any difference with today’s ultra fast SSDs.

16 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I’ve never bothered doing that in all the years I’ve used the various versions of ESP. I’m not convinced it makes any difference with today’s ultra fast SSDs.

I do and my P3D starts within very short time, so maybe worth to try

@Ray Proudfoot

I have a newer system than you and with all my AI, Airplanes and Sceneries, I have up to one hour to load the sim. I have SSD m.2 NVME, the same like you, enough power supply, a good motherboard, Defender Exclusions, OC, but it takes that long. 

I really wonder, what is the difference between your and mine sim, since you also have a lot of addons, do you? 

With adding more addons I could clearly see how starting time increased on P3D5. It used to be lightning fast, when I first installed it without addons. 

Dan

I have 5 addon aircraft in addition to the defaults. I have a total of 266 entries in Scenery Config Editor which includes scenery installed in the conventional way plus via Add-On.

I have several hundred AIG Ai BGLs plus a small number of AIGFP ones.

Loading up this morning it takes between 1-2 mins to show the scenario screen and a further 2-3 mins to load the sim fully.

@blaunarwal, an hour seems ridiculous. @Pete Dowson has loads of European airports but perhaps crucially only one addon aircraft for his install. I don’t recall how long it takes to load but it’s around 10 mins perhaps. He too has lots of AIG aircraft.

People need to be specific about how much scenery and aircraft they have.

@Ray Proudfoot

Your load is pretty small. That makes it clear, why your sim loads that fast. I had this state too, two years ago, when I switched from 4.5 to five before I added my addons.  

I have countless addon planes and helicopters, payware and freeware, and yes, I don't fly all of them regularely. It's kind of a collectors addiction and I have to sometimes force me to get another plane out of the hangar. My collection grew over the years since 2006 i'd say, when FSX came out.

Also sceneries are covering the whole world meanwhile. I can fly almost everywhere. So one hour is not ridiculous, it's loading a heavy sim, whereas your sim is pretty light then. I might be ridiculous having so many planes and sceneries, but not my experience with the sim.

So unlike you, Id' not say my loading time is the only correct one. The threadstarters @verbal time is pretty credible to me. And I was pretty happy if LM could also rework the loading system for the sim, to shorten loading times for people who have more than five extra planes. 

Dan

@blaunarwal, I've always kept to a small number of aircraft. Carenado PC12 and Vertx DA-62 for low level stuff. PMDG737 NGXu for the majority of my flights. Xtreme Prototypes Lear 25 for executive jet and Concorde for oceanic flights. I have that in v3 at present but it will be added to my v5 collection when available.

I'm happy flying into the default airports in v5. I'll buy airports but they have to be of decent quality. We all decide what's important to us and live with the consequences.

1 hour ago, blaunarwal said:

I might be ridiculous having so many planes and sceneries, but not my experience with the sim.

The P3D load time can be ridiculously long if your P3D has lots of content all marked as active.

Both you and @verbalshould take a look at Lorby-SI's P3D Addon Organizer.
What is great about this freeware / donationware piece of software is that it allows you to group scenery / objects / libraries, etc. and easily turn them on or off as desired.

At peak P3D, I had just under 1,000 scenery entries, including 4 TB of photoscenery and over 700 AIG AI airlines, 7 payware airliners and 3 GA aircraft all loading in. Oh, and Orbx's Vector. It would take *forever* (I lost count after 30 minutes) to load.
Start time was much more manageable by separating these into continent-sized and even as small as country-sized groups. I unloaded irrelevant scenery and AI airlines and loaded only those elements that I wanted to appear in the part of the World I was interested in for that particular session.
Once groups were set up in Lorby-SI's Addon Organizer, whole swathes of add-ons can be turned on or off with just a few simple clicks. Start-up for P3D would drop to about 5-10 minutes for me (mainly due to using my use of always running TrueEarth, other photoscenery, citypacks and payware airports, all containing lots of objects).

It's a method I still use today in *that other sim* to minimise start-up times.

Take a look: https://www.lorby-si.com/downloads.html

The support sub-forum is here: https://www.avsim.com/forums/forum/788-lorby-si-support-forum/