I profiled our Editor startup in Unreal Insights today, hoping to find something I could do to improve launch times. It’s not SO bad, it it looks like it took 1m37s to get past boot/init to the first tick. What I found is that 1m17s of that (about 80%) was spent in LoadModule, split across 1m2s in FPlatformProcess_GetDllHandle and 15s in StartupModule. I wanted to ask if this is expected, or if there could be slowdown from our antivirus software or something. I can’t disable it myself to test, so mainly looking for a “that sounds crazy, talk to your IT department” or a “yeah, that’s about right”. All the common pitfalls seem addressed (last access time disabled, Smart App Control disabled). Appreciate any information you can offer here.
UE 5.6.1
Windows 11 23H2
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX 32-Cores 3.50 GHz
You might want to have a chat with your IT department. I ran some local test and The Fortnite editor spends ~26.6s in FPlatformProcess_GetDllHandle for 2728 calls. The suspects would be Windows SmartScreen and virus\malware scanning software.
I’m running on a 3995WX which is a 64 cores chip that is similar to yours.
I ran another test and the time jumped to 52.1 seconds spent in FPlatformProcess_GetDllHandle so there is definitely some “disk” related impact. A consecutive run clocked at 16.8s for the same measurement to add more to the suspicion. Windows uses free RAM as a cache the file system. I have 256GB so it’s conceivable that all files (including DLLs) where read from RAM for the 2nd run.
Thanks for that info. I did another test today and got slightly more encouraging numbers, but they didn’t seem correlated to antivirus. I ran the Editor once to make sure DDC was up to date, rebooted, then twice with AV disabled, rebooted, and twice with AV re-enabled. I compared the 3rd and 5th runs, which were both “warm”. Today, I got 1m4s until first tick with no AV, and just 58s with AV. So that’s confusing, but doesn’t point to AV as a smoking gun.
In the case with AV, it says of that 58s, 33.8s was spent in FPlatformProcess_GetDllHandle with a Count of 1,124. So where yours had an average of 9.75 microseconds per load, mine averaged 30 microseconds (3x slower). Does your processor by chance have a faster clock speed than mine? Since the dll loading is all done on the game thread, I’m wondering if we’re being limited by a processor with more cores but lower peak speeds. This one is 3.5 GHz base, with a turbo clock up to 4.2 GHz (though obviously whether it’s hitting that boost, and how often, is based on many factors).
If yours is not faster than that, I’d be open to any other speculation that might explain the difference.