X-Plane = Loves SSD

[djrisc]

Uhh wow.

I bought a SSD today for my system. I installed Windows 7 and X-plane 64bit on it. The speed increase is pretty impressive.

The load times are ridiculously fast! (No more waiting around for 5 minutes for X-Plane to load.)

Nice..

Brett

[JN_]

I've been using SSD all along and load times are painfully slow for me. I just assumed I wasn't getting any benefit with SSD. Maybe I was wrong, and it could be a lot worse.

[djrisc]

Yeah, it cut my load time down by at least a full minute.

Brett

[ayarbro]

Hey JN_! You on a PC or Mac? Might want to make sure the firmware is up to date on the SSD and , if you have a mac, TRIM is enabled. I know from experience that the aftermarket SSD's on macs can be slow as a turtle if TRIM is not enables. In that case, try TRIMenabler.http://www.groths.org/trim-enabler/

[JN_]

Well my SSD is super fast, but x-plane loading time still leaves a lot to be desired. I think I've read that x-plane loading is quite cpu intensive, so I suspect I may be cpu-bound at this stage. If so, then when I upgrade my cpu (sometime soon), I would expect a healthy improvement in startup time. I'm currently running Win7 on Intel core i5-2500k. I guess I should check the cpu load while starting up x-plane.

[JN_]

Ok I timed and profiled the initial loading and here's what I get.

Initial load time: 1m 00s
- first 50s at 25% cpu (equivalent to 1 of 4 cores; this stage must be single-threaded)
- final 10s at 100% cpu (this is the "asynchronous load" stage; appears to be threaded out to utilize all cores)

Observations:
(1) Ok, so I'm surprised it only took 1 minute, but I swear it's painfully slow. Must be all the reloading that x-plane continually does whenever you tweak any setting that's driving me crazy.
(2) It does indeed appear cpu-bound.