resolved Orbx Libraries makes P3D Load Autogen at 70% far too SLOW

[Max Nash]

Hi All,

 

I've got a bit of a problem. I've recently built a new PC for the flight sim, and am installing all my stuff to it. So far I've got all my addons on there including the Airport Scenery and FSLabs etc... However I have found that Orbx Libraries causes P3D to get to 70% loaded after pressing "OK" in the scenario screen, then take at least 10 minutes to get to 80%, then it goes quickly to 100% into the simulator. While the simulator does appear to work once it loads in, waiting upwards of 11 minutes for it to load is just not acceptable, given my old and less powerful PC loaded the lot without issue in little more than a minute.

 

The sim is P3Dv4.5 HF3, the PC specs are i7-10700K, RTX 2070 Super.

 

So far, I've tried:

-Reinstalling the Libraries product multiple times

-Reinstalling Global Base Pack multiple times

-Reinstalling Orbx Central and trying again

-Moving P3D's drive to a different SATA port on the motherboard

-Uninstalling and reinstalling the P3D Scenery Library

-Moving the order of priority for Orbx Products in P3D itself

 

I'm now utterly confused, and out of ideas. The Global Base Pack is a fantastic product which I do not want to fly without, so any ideas to help get Libraries working would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks! Max

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

have you excluded all your flight simulation software from the attentions of any anti virus software?

If you open the Windows Resource Monitor, then Disk and the drop down Disk Activity page, you can

look and see what is going on during the lengthy delay.

That might help you to fix the problem.

[Max Nash]

Hi Nick,

 

Thanks very much for your response. I've excluded the flight sim and Orbx software from antivirus, but P3D still gets stuck going slow when it starts to load autogen at 70%

 

Max

[Nick Cooper]

Thanks, what do you see in the Performance Monitor while this is happening?

[Max Nash]

Ah, here we have our problem. The drive I have P3D on is doing next to nothing, this must be why it's so slow. I'm going to try updating motherboard's SATA drivers and swapping the drive's SATA cable and will report back. Thanks again for your help Nick, much appreciated. 

[Max Nash]

Trying that, this is what happened. Using a different SATA cable made no difference, and trying to update SATA drivers caused issues for the PC, I had to reset the CMOS to get back into Windows. So I'm fairly confident something that Orbx Libraries is doing is what is causing the problem here. I can fly without it for now, but it would be nice to have this fixed as it makes a large difference to flying, particularly at night with the stunning FTX lights. 

 

For reference, here's two screenshots during the load in of P3D Autogen to show what the Performance Monitor says with and without Libraries installed. P3D is installed on (D:) Drive, which is a 240 GB SSD, which is about 10 months old. 

 

Thanks, Max

[pmb]

Do you have Orbx sceneries installed within the simulator or in an external library? I had it in an external library and load times were 10-12 min, and longer . A good deal of this was until the first (dots) screen appeares, but also the rest took forever. This was plainly unacceptable. All respective directories excepted from MS Defender.

 

I migrated all Orbx back into the simulator (not downloading 900 GB again, I had a backup from before library migration and only synched and checked files later) and now it starts up in 3-4 min.

 

This is P3D5HFII. I've seen similar reports, but others can't confirm this, so it still seems to be an open question what's causing it. I decided just to leave it alone right now and am happy about the 3 min.

 

Kind regards, Michael

[Smudger]

1 hour ago, Max Nash said:

P3D is installed on (D:) Drive, which is a 240 GB SSD,

Hello Max,

How full is your D: drive, with a HDD it is advised to leave 10 - 15% free, I seem to recall more free space with an SSD is required, otherwise it chokes.

 

[Max Nash]

Thanks for the advice guys!

 

pmb - Ah ok, understood. Yeah, it’s all installed into the main P3D directory, I’ve tried it in both that and Orbx library but it doesn’t seem to change the load times between either one. If it was just 5 minutes or so to load I’d live with it, but it’s started taking in excess of 20-25 minutes to load which is just not going to be viable.

 

Smudger - The D: Drive SSD is only about half full currently, so I’m not sure that is the cause. Shall keep searching. We’ll solve it, eventually..

 

Thanks again for all your help. Max

[Max Nash]

Hi all,

 

I've tried putting P3D on a different drive, but Orbx Libraries is still causing the same issue on that drive (which loads P3D fine without Libraries as well), so it cannot be my drive at fault. Something to do with Orbx Libraries is making the drive read files very slowly. I am not a computer expert, I've tried next to everything I can do and am beginning to get slightly tired of this I've asked friends, I've scanned the internet, but now this is on Orbx. I can fly without it for now, but there's my £55 sat effectively wasted right now, and simply the sim looks pretty bad without it. Any support would be appreciated. 

 

Thanks. Max

[Smudger]

2 hours ago, Max Nash said:

Any support would be appreciated. 

Hello Max,

if as Nick asked, you are certain that a virus software has been excluded from the attentions of P3Dv4, are your Orbx Libs set correctly in your scenery library ?

Are you running P3Dv4 as Administrator with Full Rights ? Plus your Orbx Library if it is outside the P4Dv4 folder.

Remember the Orbx Libraries are concerned with ALL Orbx scenery.

It has to be something simple that is giving you a problem

 

[Quantum Amiga]

Well...

 

There is a windows utility named Process Monitor designed to log among other things, file access. I use it to see what is accessing what files and it might be a useful tool for reviewing what is going on behind the scenes.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

 

I run a scripted P3D start calling a number of applications, automatically setting the desired screen mode and the time from click the P3D start script to the scenario selection window is a rounded up 6 minutes. Form clicking the OK on the senario screen to loading the defaut flight I have set (Orbx 11S on Orbx Pacific Northwest) is a rounded up 3 minutes.

 

Being a total of around 9 minutes to point of being ready to fly which I think is pretty good for ~851 GB of data and applications.

 

The breakdown is - P3D, the add-ons libraries (12 x auto discovery) for aircraft and selected sceneries (some 211 GB), the standard "Addon Scenery" folder (426 GB), all of the Orbx Global products and a fair proportion of the LC and Regions, all up totalling approx. 851 GB installed on a 1 TB M.2 NVMe drive stick dedicated to P3D (Read up to 3,500MB/s, Write up to 3,300MB/s). It 's a pretty quick drive and all happens quite fast.

 

Also have the Windows Page file on the same drive (set @ 10 GB) and the folders mentioned above excluded from realtime antimalware scanning (scheduled scanning and scheduled backup still happens and files are still scanned when downloaded).

 

If using Process Monitor beware it will log a lot of data (huge amounts), however it does have filtering down to the applicaition level.

 

Cheers

 

 

 

[Max Nash]

Thanks again for your help guys!

 

Unfortunately this hasn't fixed the issue. I have tried moving the layers of Orbx sceneries but it doesn't seem to be making a difference to the loading times of autogen. The whole sim is excluded from any anti-virus software. Bear in mind I'm running on the sim, the FSLabs Airbuses, UK2000 Luton 2020 HD, Aerosoft Balearic's Pro, MK Studios Tenerife, TomatoShade, Active Sky and RealTurb. All of this will load flawlessly together in no more than two minutes, and runs a treat. As soon as I install Orbx libraries, that's it. It gets stuck loading the Auto Generated scenery very slowly, taking around half an hour last time I tried it all the way. Once it does load, it seems to be there. The drive is reading files so slowly when I try to load Orbx Libraries, during the loading of Auto Generated scenery. Global BASE on its own will load fine, but of course won't work properly without Libraries. 

 

Thanks again,

 

Max

[Quantum Amiga]

Ok, after some thought another option to trial is the use of a mounted image file into a ram disk.

 

Essentually to place the Orbx Libs into what is the fastest storage space possibly available.

 

I assume given a new machine there is a plethora of ram memory to spare and thus a proportion can be dedicated as a ram disk.

 

Grab this program, it's free to trial.

 

https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/

 

Install, read the instructions and have a play and experiment first, don't worry, it's pretty simple and fairly intuative.

 

I ran through the process myself and it was no drama, it even shaved a minute of the load senario in my previous post.

• From within the program create a disk image of suitable size to hold the Orbx libs (about 3 GB, mine is 6 GB because I have plenty of ram to spare and I use it for video recording).
• Mount the newly created image as the drive letter you'll be using as the ram disk drive letter.
• In Orbx Central create a new library on the mounted disk, mine was simply N:\OrbxLibs and named as Orbx Libraries.
• Migrate or install the Orbx libs into the mounted disk newly created Orbx Library, mine was a migration.
• Unmount the disk image and config the ramdisk to mount the image using the appropriate drive letter as used for the New Orbx Library, can be set to mount either on login or boot.
• Ensure Save Contents to Image is ticked to write the current RAM disk contents to the associated image file on shutdown. I also set a regular time to write back to the image (60mins).
• Check the anti malware software in use and ensure it is excluding the new path.
• If there is any monitoring backup software in place ensure it is not actively monitoring the new path.

 

That should be it, if Orbx Libs is updated by Central the save contents to image option and regular time write will take care of keeping the image up to date, also there is a manual option to save to image.

 

 

[Max Nash]

Hi again,

 

Thanks a lot for the advice Quantum!

 

I'm pleased to say it is fixed. What I did in the end after browsing various forum threads and found someone with seemingly the same issue, I found what fixed it for them was to delete the P3D scenery.cfg file, restart P3D and let it rebuild, and then try again installing Libraries. I did this, and it worked. I'm back in the air flying. 

 

Thanks again to all who helped me out, I very much appreciate your time. 

 

Have a great day, Max.

[Hans Jaspers]

Deleted, started new thread