Does Community Folder Content Affect Load Time?

Yes, of course: the bigger the file (and the more of them), the longer it takes to load. This is my point, in fact.

I do have a ton of addons, but as you will see from my post, I use only a few in any given flying session -- that's the beauty of using an addon manager. Typically my load time for MSFS is 2-3 minutes.

Not sure I follow you -- Gigabytes vs. number/type of addons? Regardless, the bottom line is: more stuff in Community equals longer load times -- by a LOT if you have a ton of addons (as I have demonstrated); less stuff equals shorter load times. Nothing new here, as most msfs users have discovered this for themselves.

What I suspect is that the sim is focused more on indexing the add-ons at launch, rather than loading all of the data. Think of cataloguing all the books in a library. Noting the title, author and category is going to take about the same amount of time for each book, no matter how short or long each book is.

What I suspect is that the sim is focused more on indexing the add-ons at launch, rather than loading all of the data. Think of cataloguing all the books in a library. Noting the title, author and category is going to take about the same amount of time for each book, no matter how short or long each book is.

Thats what I said as the Scenery Library in Fsx...

I think you guys are wrong, I am not mad, have repeated the tests and will keep saying that other factors affect loading time, so much that they always vary, they are not exact loading times, it will depend on windows, xbox and msfs drivers accessing the servers, your ram, cpu other pc processes interfering etc.

There are 2 folders next to Official, Community and Manual Cache, none is affected at startup other than to read aircraft index to display in Hangar. The Manual Cache Folder works similar, you can have 60gb of selected areas but it wont read them and at startup, only when you are flying in that area and even so "load as needed" so as fps are kept high.

There is a thread in facebook msfs, which aside from the gamers irresponsible joking you can see a pattern in the replies. The time is more a less constant or varies with the pc rig, but all these kids have tons of mods installed. Some have read (as you people here) that size of community affects the time and say so, Its a mix of comments, but the pattern is for the vast majority with loaded community it takes a few minutes.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/101987210144851/permalink/1463948940615331/

Well, of course there are many factors that affect loading times. I assume that this thread is a discussion of the effect of having a lot of add-ons in Community on load timeswith all other factors held constant. For a system as complex as MSFS, this is really the only rational way to deal with this issue. As I described earlier, for me the effect is huge and dramatic, with a heavily loaded Community folder slowing load times to a crawl, and others on this and other MSFS forums have seen the same thing (I don't know about facebook).

BTW, regarding "all those kids with mods installed": Some of us kids are so old, we have kids that aren't kids any more!