I'm curious if anyone knows how MSFS uses the community folder. Here, after installing thousands of 3rd party aircraft models, the load time for MSFS 2020 went up by quite a bit. That implies that MSFS is doing something with the community folder at startup, but it seems doubtful that MSFS goes to local storage to literally load everything into RAM on the remote chance that something might be required.

It seems more sensible that MSFS would just scan the community folder and load pointers to the things that might be needed later? This seems much more reasonable, but if this is true, then it seems (to my uneducated brain) that it takes a crazy long amount of time. Say you have 7,000 items in your community folder: 6000 aircraft models and 1000 airports. If all you need to do is to load a pointer to each one, then loading 7000 pointers should take a negligible amount of time.

Conversely, loading absolutely everything would be ridiculously wasteful of RAM. 

So how does MSFS use the community folder? Does anyone have an idea? I don't know that the answer to this question would necessarily change anything, but there's a chance it might. For example, moving certain things via Addon Linker to slower (and cheaper) storage if the impact on gameplay is zero.

 

I'm curious if anyone knows how MSFS uses the community folder?

You can see for yourself using the free ProcessMon app.  Start it up before starting the FS20/24 and you'll see what the sim is doing in the background, including the community folder.

Lots of indexing and the larger the community folder, the longer it takes to load - especially with  AI aircraft and boats. 

I use Addon Linker to only load what I need for the flight to keep boot times as low as possible.

It definitely reads through what is there... If there is a problem, it can actually abort the loading process.

Using ProcMon64 as suggested:  with an empty Community  Folder I found 114 I/O operations involving the Community Folder during the entire load process.  It appears Community plays little role in the load when empty.