I optimized my load times.

[Konraden]

Last week, I was having load times that were taking about 26 minutes to get the game to the main menu. I'm happy to say that I managed to get it down to a svelt 22 minutes before the main menu comes up, all by simply removing the Nova Pack. Now, before I play KSP, all I have to do is watch an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Some days, I feel like I could be setting a record.

[TooManyErrors]

Judging by those load times, you either have a ton of mods installed, or your computer's harddrive is awful. Which one is it?

[Blackstar]

Need... more... boosters^W RAM!

[magnemoe]

I thought my three minutes was a long time.

How much ram do you have?

[_Aramchek_]

Ram isn't the real limiting factor, hd speed is.

[Daneel]

I'd suspect the OP is using a laptop with something like a 4200rpm or 5400rpm drive to get loading times that slow. Mine is typically around 20-30 seconds coming off an older SSD (60GB OCZ Vertex 2) with quite a few mods installed.

[Barklight]

I have about 24-28 mods installed on my Gaming desktop, including KW, Kosmos, and B9 - which are all pretty large part content mods. Mix that in with the two-dozen other small mods that add a few parts or features or plugins. Running on an Intel 330 SSD, my load time from launch to main menu is about 3 minutes or less. Hard drive speed does make a large impact on load time.

Performance after launch is dependent on processing power and graphics capabilities, I guess?

[Tristavius]

Wow, my laptop is ancient and my load time with a fair few mods is no more than 60 seconds. Must be some epicly old hardware!

[grawl]

Mounting KSP on a RAM drive before playing is also an effective way of optimising the game's loading times.

[dr_jt]

Consider Kerbals

Edited June 6, 2013 by dr_jt

[musicpenguin]

About 20 secounds for me on a MAC OSX lion or something. About 30 GB's of space left so I might delete some of my games.

[simonh]

About 2 minutes on my late 2012 Mac Mini with Fusion Drive. I've installed about half a dozen mods. KSPX, Quantum Struts, Kethane, ISA Mapsat, Subassembly Loader and Mechjeb 2 off the top of my head.

The fusion drive is fantastic. Flash drive speeds the vast majority of the time, with over 1GB capacity. On a Windows box a Flash cache should do the same job, or a flash drive if you don't need as much capacity.

Simon Hibbs

[Brabbit1987]

Takes about 2 minutes to load with all the mods I have installed. I have mine on an SSD. I do have to say, loading all the parts at start up is stupid.

[Pontiac]

@OP: My launch to main menu is just shy of 45 seconds. Desktop [email protected] w/ RAID-0 twin 256gig SSD drives, 12gig (4gig/3chan) of 1200mhz Memory, quad monitor setup with a GTX570 and EN8800GTX. I've got 13 Mods installed. I don't know what everyone elses mod counts are. 22+ minutes ... sounds horrible. But shows you're dedicated..?

@Brabbit> The feeling I get from the game is that its kind of required just based on that its probably the best place to put it. From a developers stand point and what I gather, its linking all the mods so the core 'brain' of the game doesn't have to figure out if the resources are available. So, it pre-loads the required info, links it up internally, then via the magic of Object Oriented Programming, inheritance, and other wonderful tools (Couple more terms I just can't think of right now. Too much blood in my coffee system still), the core can reach out to any of the objects immediately without having to refer to the HDD again. I SUPPOSE that once the item is needed, it could load it, but, you'd be facing the exact same lag the moment you got into VAB. The core would have to load each mod at that point to at least get the image details. I prefer waiting the extra time at the beginning to have quick swaps between the rest of the game.

[Brabbit1987]

@OP: My launch to main menu is just shy of 45 seconds. Desktop [email protected] w/ RAID-0 twin 256gig SSD drives, 12gig (4gig/3chan) of 1200mhz Memory, quad monitor setup with a GTX570 and EN8800GTX. I've got 13 Mods installed. I don't know what everyone elses mod counts are. 22+ minutes ... sounds horrible. But shows you're dedicated..?

@Brabbit> The feeling I get from the game is that its kind of required just based on that its probably the best place to put it. From a developers stand point and what I gather, its linking all the mods so the core 'brain' of the game doesn't have to figure out if the resources are available. So, it pre-loads the required info, links it up internally, then via the magic of Object Oriented Programming, inheritance, and other wonderful tools (Couple more terms I just can't think of right now. Too much blood in my coffee system still), the core can reach out to any of the objects immediately without having to refer to the HDD again. I SUPPOSE that once the item is needed, it could load it, but, you'd be facing the exact same lag the moment you got into VAB. The core would have to load each mod at that point to at least get the image details. I prefer waiting the extra time at the beginning to have quick swaps between the rest of the game.

The issue with that, is it causes poor performance. It actually works worse then loading it later on when it is needed because it loads everything into memory. Sure you may get some loading times in VAB, but it would run better as it has more memory to play with. My game crashes after about an hour on high settings due to out of memory and I have 8GB. There are many games that work in very similar ways as KSP, that do not need to load everything at start up. I don't think putting it at the start is ever the best place to put it.

[llamatoes]

I have a 707 mb part folder with 367 installed, load times of 2 minutes, I am down mods I adore, any way to reduce load times?

[skykooler]

I am now really curious as to what hardware the OP has such that it takes over twenty minutes to load...but then is still good enough to make the game playable. I feel like that combination should be impossible, unless you've installed the game to a network hard drive or something.

[Pontiac]

The issue with that, is it causes poor performance. It actually works worse then loading it later on when it is needed because it loads everything into memory. Sure you may get some loading times in VAB, but it would run better as it has more memory to play with. My game crashes after about an hour on high settings due to out of memory and I have 8GB. There are many games that work in very similar ways as KSP, that do not need to load everything at start up. I don't think putting it at the start is ever the best place to put it.

I've rewritten a reply to this several times, from multi-page, to several paragraphs, to a couple sentences, and .. well.. I'd rather play KSP.

I'm going to just leave it at, with full respect, I cannot disagree with you more for a couple of reasons. All of them technical, none of which really apply to the thread. You see things your way, I see things my way, and, honestly, its just not worth the pissing match.

Off to blow up some more space ships!!

[Atomictank]

Mine used to be really slow, even with a good hard drive but crap RAM, so I went from 2GB of Ram to 16 and tripled my processing power (four cores at 2.7Ghz to eight cores at 4.6Ghz)

[Pontiac]

The issue with that, is it causes poor performance. It actually works worse then loading it later on when it is needed because it loads everything into memory. Sure you may get some loading times in VAB, but it would run better as it has more memory to play with. My game crashes after about an hour on high settings due to out of memory and I have 8GB. There are many games that work in very similar ways as KSP, that do not need to load everything at start up. I don't think putting it at the start is ever the best place to put it.

I've rewritten a reply to this several times, from multi-page, to several paragraphs, to a couple sentences, and .. well.. I'd rather play KSP.

I'm going to just leave it at, with full respect, I cannot disagree with you more for a couple of reasons. All of them technical, none of which really apply to the thread. You see things your way, I see things my way, and, honestly, its just not worth the pissing match.

I have a 707 mb part folder with 367 installed, load times of 2 minutes, I am down mods I adore, any way to reduce load times?

Most of that will probably be graphical information, such as texture images, and such. I'm at 307 which is pretty close to stock.

I am now really curious as to what hardware the OP has such that it takes over twenty minutes to load...but then is still good enough to make the game playable. I feel like that combination should be impossible, unless you've installed the game to a network hard drive or something.

As am I, actually. Someone mentioned a low end RPM drive, which would make a SIGNIFICANT impact. But once its loaded, its playable? So you have a low end drive, with a mid to high end video card? Type Mismatch indeed.

Anyways, off to blow up some more space ships!!

[Psycked]

Has the OP actually tried a vanilla version of the game to see if they get same load times?

[Randox]

A memory stick is a very easy way to reduce load times. It's not as fast as an SSD, but it's several times faster than an HDD. KSP is not very big, so it's easy to fit it, and a few other games on there if you like for reduced loading time. Your gpu still has to work through all the conversions, but that doesn't take nearly as long as reading the initial textures.

[Brabbit1987]

I've rewritten a reply to this several times, from multi-page, to several paragraphs, to a couple sentences, and .. well.. I'd rather play KSP.

I'm going to just leave it at, with full respect, I cannot disagree with you more for a couple of reasons. All of them technical, none of which really apply to the thread. You see things your way, I see things my way, and, honestly, its just not worth the pissing match.

Off to blow up some more space ships!!

You have every right to disagree, no matter how long or how technical you get, doesn't mean you are right. I play many simulation games, and not once have I ever seen a game load all of it's objects into memory before they where needed. I also know a thing or 2 about computers and designing video games. I really can't see any benefit besides objects loading faster in VAB, which really isn't necessary.

Do you consider a game running out of memory, good design?

Now, I very well could be wrong, you might be right. It is not very likely though because, not a single game has ever benefited such a design.

Also, before you say anything else. You started this by even commenting on my reply like that. If you do not want to get into, then simply don't.

[Randox]

If you want to see crippling load times, go play Sims 3 (with as many expansions as possible). I've seen it take about 5 minutes to get into the game, and loading certain parts of it lead to load times that can be north of 30 seconds (that you get to go through twice if you go to another page). It's so bad it actually prevents from even wanting to try it, because having reading material at the computer desk would seem to be an integral part of the gaming experience.

Granted, the computer I saw it happen to isn't the fastest (I think a 5400rpm HDD). But then, my primary is 5700 (secondary 5400), so yeah, not even going to consider that.

[Brabbit1987]

If you want to see crippling load times, go play Sims 3 (with as many expansions as possible). I've seen it take about 5 minutes to get into the game, and loading certain parts of it lead to load times that can be north of 30 seconds (that you get to go through twice if you go to another page). It's so bad it actually prevents from even wanting to try it, because having reading material at the computer desk would seem to be an integral part of the gaming experience.

Granted, the computer I saw it happen to isn't the fastest (I think a 5400rpm HDD). But then, my primary is 5700 (secondary 5400), so yeah, not even going to consider that.

Sims has always had fairly bad loading times. However, I have to say I can load Sims 3 faster then KSP even with expansions installed. It also has a ton more information to load then KSP.