Program Startup Time vs Addons

Has anyone noticed if there is a significant increase in MSFS startup time as addon items are added to the Community folder?

I recently added 6 items (4 scenery, 2 a/c repaints), and the next time I started the sim, it initially displayed a black screen for about 4 minutes before getting to the Asobo screen, then sat on the copyrights screen for another 3 minutes or so, before finally completing the startup normally.

I assumed this was normal the first time, figuring the sim had to "index" all the new files, but it has behaved this way ever since.

I don't have that much in my Community folder, considering what is available. Is there anyone out there with a lot of addons installed? Does it affect your startup time?

Thanks for any feedback!

It doesn’t sound normal to me. I have a lot more downloads in my community folder & I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference. The screen certainly doesn’t go black.

If you remove the addons does it go back to normal?

Regards

Steve

By "black screen" I meant the brief black screen that normally appears just before the "X Box Studios" screen comes up. This was dragging on for several minutes for me, but things would eventually come up normally.

Anyway, I did delete those recent addons from the Community folder and things did indeed go back to normal. I'm putting them back one at a time to see which one is the culprit.

Thanks for your feedback!

I noticed this lengthening of startup time early on as I started collecting "nice to have" addons. There are a couple of third party programmes around, I use MSFS Addon Linker which is very simple and effective, which manage which addons are loaded into the sim at startup. They have to be run before starting MSFS as once loaded they cannot be changed. You can pick and choose what you want to use in your next session and Addon Linker also lets you choose presets so you can save your selection or use a different preset for something else. Works for all addons, not just airports/scenery.

I've experimented a bit, found with no addons the sim loaded to the Welcome screen in around 1m 35s whereas with everything in I gave up waiting after 20 mins and manually shut it down through Task Manager - there doesn't seem any way to abort loading once it starts.