Good evening gentlemen wherever you may be as well as any Ladies.

For context I'll give you an example of how I arrived with having so many payware and freeware addons in my community folder. I completely quit drinking about eight years ago, since then I've used the weekly savings in money I now have to purchase games, addons, etc. Here in Canada, where I live, booze is heavily taxed so on average I would spend about a hundred and fifty dollars worth every week either at home or at the local pub. You get the picture. Since building a new machine back in May of 2022 I've purchased roughly that same amount every week on MSFS scenery, aircraft, utilities, etc; developers LOVE me. This new habit has amassed a huge community library with thousands of symbolic links across four 2TB NVMe drives. Some would think the load time when simply starting MSFS with this many addons in the community folder would be excruciatingly long and painful, however it's not that bad, roughly and a half minutes.

Fast forward to about a month ago and I started having crashes for the first time, however these crashes are repeatable like clockwork. With this many addons I can now only create and fly three different times when upon the fourth time of hitting escape, selecting a different plane and/or departure airport then selecting Fly the sim will crash 1/3 of the way through loading the flight. As I said before this can be recreated like clockwork. So far I have solved this by simply running only all of my OrbX Central and Aerosoft libraries at one time; all of which I own 90% of the products offered by these services.

Sorry for the long babble and annoying time it took to get to the point. Have any of you ladies and/or gentlemen come across this issue or anything similar to it? Do any of you think this is being caused by a specific addon(s) or simply just running far too many of them at the same time? So far I'm simply adding back my payware only mods to see at what point the crashes start again. I am fully aware of the fantastic application MSFS Addons Linker and I've used it in the past, however I guess I'm a sucker for not wanting any limitations of where I feel like flying if I don't have X,Y and Z addons loaded. Would love to hear any comments, opinions, solutions and/or recommendations. I'm currently running an Intel 13900K, 64GB DDR5-8000, GTX 4090.

Hope all of you have a fantastic weekend!
Thanks for reading! 

Edited August 17, 20241 yr by Jocko Flocko

1 hour ago, Jocko Flocko said:

Fast forward to about a month ago and I started having crashes for the first time, however these crashes are repeatable like clockwork. With this many addons I can now only create and fly three different times when upon the fourth time of hitting escape, selecting a different plane and/or departure airport then selecting Fly the sim will crash 1/3 of the way through loading the flight. As I said before this can be recreated like clockwork. So far I have solved this by simply running only all of my OrbX Central and Aerosoft libraries at one time; all of which I own 90% of the products offered by these services.
 

To be honest I ALWAYS shut down the sim completely and load from scratch for every flight, that was certainly always the recommendation for previous sims anyway.

In terms of addons though I only load those that I will be using in the flight (using add-on manager).

 

G

i tend to prefix all of my object libraries and stuff I always keep loaded with AA, I have a folder for each country I fly in and prefix the contents of each, then just load up the country or countries I am going to use per session.

Some prefer addon linker, but I've always done it this way in msfs and previous simulators..

Try regionalizing your scenery addons and use MSFS AddonsLinker to switch on only those where you intend to fly.

To counter the crashes, If I was you, I would disable all non-essential addons and look if it runs stable. Then, enable addons in batches until the crashes return. Then trach it down to that single addon.

I have hundreds of addons (close to1.000) and I usually have all addons active all the time. Apart from looong loading times it doesn't seem to hurt stabilty.

Off course I have had some crashes in the past. Most were related to hardware- or driver issues. In a few cases however I was able to pinpoint a specific addon being the cause.
Two of these were probably related to the navigation data (SID en STAR) because the sim crashed when I used these in a flightplan. Flying VFR out of the airports did not cause any issues. After removing or replacing the airports by one of another developer these issues were solved.

To check whether a specific addon is the cause there are methods eliminating the cullprit.

Easy solution: Move to Germany - Booze is cheap as dirt here - you can be a drunk AND a scenery-and-aircraft-acquiring simmer 😉.

 

On a more serious note:

I don't get why so many people have issues with their community folders and even use things like 'library managers'.

I manually move Scenery, Aircraft and Other files when not needed ( or the community folder gets 'stuffed' ) from SSD to other Backup SSD's or HDD's. 

Requires that you somewhat keep track of the file names - maybe just  created a text file where you log what you move when and where. ( Or do it in your head )

Been doing this for years and never had an issue. Keep your community folder lean and mean.

 

Also - some specific addons can lead to issues - doesn't matter if you have hundreds of smooth running ones - 1 problematic might ruin the whole thing.

Recommend you check recently installed ones and remove some and try running again.

Edited August 17, 20241 yr by Tommy_1

1 hour ago, Tommy_1 said:

I manually move.....

Linking is a much neater solution than moving.  Thankfully it's no longer a Unix/Linux only thing but has been available on Windows for quite some time.  If you really want to do it manually, have a look at Link Shell Extension.   But for MSFS I prefer the Addon Linker, it may be a full-blown manager but all I use it for is linking/unlinking what I want in the Community folder - the GUI format and the various checks available are so useful.  Linking does need the disks where the files are physically kept to be reasonably fast, though.

On 8/16/2024 at 4:51 PM, Jocko Flocko said:

I completely quit drinking about eight years ago, since then I've used the weekly savings in money I now have to purchase games, addons, etc. Here in Canada, where I live, booze is heavily taxed...

There should be a True Confessions subforum on Avsim !

Gents, all of your suggestions make perfect sense. If I had the time to try and find out which aircraft, airport, scenery, etc file was causing the issue I'd do it, but quite honestly there's so many of them it's enough to drive a man to drink again. I started using that scenery linker program and began moving all the scenery files in my community folder into separate categorized folders onto the different drives, so far this application works absolutely fantastic. I had no idea it has a built-in map showing you all your scenery files on a map and allows you to create categories based on regions and other aspects. For example, I just finished creating a category called "Commercial Tube Liners" where only large major international airports are linked for when I'm flying mostly at FL300 to FL400. However some files always have to be in the community folder and it's best to just leave them there. IE: Navigraph plugins, TDS GTNXI 750, scenery library files, etc. But these are nothing in size and number when compared to the massive volume and size of many large airport products. For example, FlyTampa's Las Vegas City and KLAS McCarran package is almost 6GB's on it's own...

Appreciate all the help guys, hope you all have a half decent Sunday.

Edited August 18, 20241 yr by Jocko Flocko
Grammar

8 hours ago, Jocko Flocko said:

I started using that scenery linker program

Another convert!👏😊

21 hours ago, Tommy_1 said:

I don't get why so many people have issues with their community folders and even use things like 'library managers'.

I manually move Scenery, Aircraft and Other files when not needed ( or the community folder gets 'stuffed' ) from SSD to other Backup SSD's or HDD's.

Well, if you're happy with all those unnecessary read/write actions on your drives... Personally, I prefer to extend the life of my drives by only having the symbolic links written to my Community Folder drive as and  when needed. Time and drive life saved. It's worth it, even just for the organizational benefit.

22 hours ago, Tommy_1 said:

 

 

On a more serious note:

I manually move Scenery, Aircraft and Other files when not needed ( or the community folder gets 'stuffed' )
Requires that you somewhat keep track of the file names -

Use Addon-Linker. It solves all problems arising from an overloaded Community folder, is free, greatly enhances the use of MSFS, and is by any measure THE indispensable addon for this sim.

On 8/17/2024 at 10:50 PM, lzamm said:

Linking is a much neater solution than moving.  Thankfully it's no longer a Unix/Linux only thing but has been available on Windows for quite some time.  If you really want to do it manually, have a look at Link Shell Extension.   But for MSFS I prefer the Addon Linker, it may be a full-blown manager but all I use it for is linking/unlinking what I want in the Community folder - the GUI format and the various checks available are so useful.  Linking does need the disks where the files are physically kept to be reasonably fast, though.

 

On 8/18/2024 at 6:17 PM, 109Sqn said:

Well, if you're happy with all those unnecessary read/write actions on your drives... Personally, I prefer to extend the life of my drives by only having the symbolic links written to my Community Folder drive as and  when needed. Time and drive life saved. It's worth it, even just for the organizational benefit.

 

Maybe I'm stuck in the 'old ways' a little. Or simply continued to use what has worked for me well for so long.
Or I was just too lazy to adopt a new method of managing my files.

Am aware of continued R/W processes decreasing the overall lifespan of SSD's. 

As my library also constantly grows I should look at new ways of managing all the data.
I think I will at least try it out after the feedback/advice here.

( Also might be that I am stuck a little in a 'frugal' mindset. Still considering SSD as 'valuable' storage space and basically only move what I really need onto it.
Large Libraries of mostly unused scenery get stored on 'cheap' HDD Space. )

As you mentioned linking only makes sense when files are kept on fast disks. Ironically by now I have enough of those now anyways.

On 8/18/2024 at 9:31 AM, Jocko Flocko said:

 but quite honestly there's so many of them it's enough to drive a man to drink again.

That would be ironic, wouldn't it. The very hobby you got to spend more time and money on because you quit drinking driving you to the bottle again 😉.
Kidding aside - lets hope that doesn't happen. Congrats on 8 plus years of sobriety.
You aren't the only one trying to stay away from the stuff.

 

On 8/18/2024 at 9:31 AM, Jocko Flocko said:

Appreciate all the help guys, hope you all have a half decent Sunday.

Wishing you an - albeit delayed - not just half but a decent Sunday. Seeing as you wrote this around half past 3 in the morning your local time I hope you caught up on some sleep 😁.