I just sat down and timed my P3Dv5 startup to the scenario screen, and it's 3:50--that's minutes, not hours 😁--with all 372 of my add-on airport packages active (plus literally hundreds of others included in my Orbx regions and other scenery packages), plus a large AIG installation with several hundred AI variants.  One thing, though--I do not use photosceneries other than what's embedded in some of the Orbx stuff and a handful of airports.

Now I have a very fast system, but my last P3D machine (a 5.2 GHz 10-core 10900K) wasn't a whole lot slower to load...I'd estimate 30 sec or so slower.  The P3D initial loading process is mostly done on a single CPU core, so raw CPU speed helps and massive numbers of cores does not.

I use Lorby-SI's P3D Addon Organizer to group my sceneries into regions, and I typically disable those regions I'm not flying in/through for a flight.  It does make a noticeable difference in loading time.

15 minutes is a long startup--that would drive me up the wall, frankly...if you're on an HDD I might consider that normal, but on an SSD it should load faster than that.  An hour to start would be five bridges too far beyond acceptable. 

How on Earth can anyone cope with a startup time of one hour??

I was a bit underwhelmed with my P3D loading times when I upgraded the boot/P3D drive from a 2TB 7200 rpm HDD to a 1TB NVMe M2, but it seems that 3 minutes is lightning fast compared to some of you. To be fair, I only have detailed scenery of Great Britain and the Netherlands (with very little elsewhere), but I have a total of 145 addon entries in my Scenery Library (277 with all of the base scenery), 242 AI plane models (plus countless repaints of most of them) in my Airplanes AI folder, and the entire contents of the Global AI Ship Traffic package active.

Are we saying here that excessive P3D load times are because every single active aircraft and scenery package is checked and logged (they are certainly not all being loaded) before displaying the SCENARIO screen? If that is the case, then Dan must either be loading every single flight simulation addon package on the planet, or there is something wrong with his installation. One hour is ridiculously excessive by anyone's standards.

@F737MAX

I used Lorby-Si Addon Manager a long time but never was able to easily group sceneries and keep the groups. They often vanished and after some hours work loosing all groups again, this you do only once. Also I have a problem with Addon Manager, always showing a not saved status due to an error somewhere in my configurations, which I could not find. The program itself unfortunately does not find these kind of errors. It's something with double config and you may imagine, how long it takes to find that with 1400 entries. The other point why I no longer love Addon Manager, it sorts sceneries and breaks my sorting, which is done by experiencing layering problems with different sceneries. In other words, it killed my work another time. Last point, I think development has stopped too. It's now pretty long the same version number.

I also have SimstarterNG and I used to load different areas in the world. Loading time influence was minimal, time to keep this order when adding new scenery in contrary rather high. So I also gave up this too. I always load all sceneries. I think scenery doesn't affect loading times as much as simobjects do. That's my long time experience with this sim.

Dan

2 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

An hour to start would be five bridges too far beyond acceptable

I fully agree, but tell the guys from LM as I did and you get only answer from the two self proclaimed supporters there.

4 hours ago, F737MAX said:

Both you and @verbalshould take a look at Lorby-SI's P3D Addon Organizer.

Glad you have had success with it. I haven't.

I've been using SS for quite some time now. It does much more than organize sceneries. Love the built in core assignment facility too.

1 hour ago, blaunarwal said:

@F737MAX

I used Lorby-Si Addon Manager a long time but never was able to easily group sceneries and keep the groups. They often vanished and after some hours work loosing all groups again, this you do only once.

8 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

Glad you have had success with it. I haven't.

Sorry to hear. All I can say is that it worked very well for me.
One thing I did was keep every Orbx add-on entered directly into P3D's main Scenery.cfg as opposed to a bunch of Add-on.xml files. I know that in Orbx Central, using a separate library folder and the Add-on.xml method of adding scenery, caused me some serious issues with priority layering.

The more objects defined as active (including libraries) definitely slows the initial load. Having Orbx Vector enabled was notoriously bad, because each vector file included massive areas of the globe at a time.
There is a fix for anyone still using it:
https://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DLID=&Name=&FileName=global_default_vector_removal.zip&Author=&CatID=root

 

I think SS has the ability to convert .xmls to .cfg files although I've never used it. I don't have enough stuff :>)

18 hours 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.

Don’t forget to not use a HDD.

I checked, and it’s 2023 now, not 1993. 😉

9 hours ago, F737MAX said:

.....One thing I did was keep every Orbx add-on entered directly into P3D's main Scenery.cfg as opposed to a bunch of Add-on.xml files. I know that in Orbx Central, using a separate library folder and the Add-on.xml method of adding scenery, caused me some serious issues with priority layering.

That addon.xml method has caused me numerous problems in the past (including ORBx products). Since then, I have steered well clear of it. All of my airport and scenery addons have been installed with the old scenery.cfg method.

For what it's worth, on my creaking but still fully functioning system I got these times.

With AIG, quite a few ORBX sceneries, about 20 payware airports but only one PMDG plane.

No sceneries "unticked", so everything loading. All from SSDs.

Times are from clicking on P3D.

Started loading XML accessories (Chaseplane, AIG TC etc.) 1m40.

Menu screen available 2m23

Pure default sim. loaded and waiting 4m20.

Not unhappy with that. 

Ian

On 3/3/2023 at 9:19 PM, Ray Proudfoot said:

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've yet to jump into the world of M2 drives. My P3D has been re-installed  😉 on a 7TB SSD, which is more than enough space for the sim and addons, and is quick enough for me, the other day must have been some anomally, P3D is loading as per normal now, maybe it was just too early in the morning for it (I start work at 4am every weekday).

I've got my fair share of AI installed now too, as you can see:

 

On 3/3/2023 at 11:15 PM, OzWhitey said:

Don’t forget to not use a HDD.

I checked, and it’s 2023 now, not 1993. 😉

Haha! Well I needed 4 TB of storage and the WD Black 4 TB drives went on sale for very cheap compared to the price of a 4 TB SDD...  Flight simulation takes a ton of space, especially when I have 4 or 5 flight simulators installed all with their own add-ons, I do have other ones on a smaller SSD.  It's really not that bad, especially since the modern WB Blacks are quite decent for mechanical drives, I only have to wait about 1 to 2 minutes for the P3D main configuration screen to pop up and usually between 7 to 15 minutes for a flight to load depending on the scenery loading.  One thing I particularly like about P3D is that I can just alt tab to whatever else I'm doing in the meantime like going through my flight plan while I wait for the flight loads.  If I try that in X-Plane, bad things happen.