I recently built a new PC after deciding it was time to move on from my 8 year old dinosaur. The new PC has been great for the most part; the specs are much better, and generally speaking it’s a much smoother experience to use it.
However, this new PC has a persistent issue with opening my main unreal project that my old one did not: it takes forever. The last logs I captured showed an engine initialization time of 9.3 minutes. This only happens on a cold start, meaning only when opening the project for the first time after turning on the PC or restarting it. When opening the project subsequent times the load time is, as expected, even faster than my old PC, around 30 seconds.
Opening a project from a cold start usually takes longer than subsequent times, but not 20 times longer. That kind of difference approaches shader recompile times, or engine recompiles after changing project settings.
Needless to say, my old PC didn’t have this issue, and it was much less powerful.
9 mins is really a very long time to start a project.
If I were you I will start by checking my hardware temperature, CPU, RAM , MB , everything.
If everything seems fine with temperature, then I would check if my BIOS configuration is the correct one for my CPU and my ram.
How much Ram do you have ? big Unreal projects need a lot of ram.
How many PCI express your mobo has ? you can change your Video card position.
What kind of Hard drive do you have ?
Someone posted about what sounds like this same issue in January here. They found that, for whatever reason, unplugging the ethernet cable (thereby disconnecting from the internet) solved the issue. I tried simply disabling my ethernet device, and sure enough the project load time from cold start was normal (about a minute).
I spent most of yesterday trying to debug this to no avail. The workaround is great because of how easy it is to toggle the ethernet device, but understanding the root cause would be even better. I’ve of course asked AI, without much luck. I just went through the process of disabling all the suspicious plugins including TCP and UDP Messaging, and the various telemetry plugins (Editor and Runtime Telemetry) as well as the Studio Telemetry plugin (which doesn’t appear in the Plugins menu in 5.6) as mentioned in the threads linked below.
Nothing seems to work.
PC Specs:
CPU: 9900X
GPU: 9070XT
RAM: 64GB DDR5
Storage:
Project | SATA SSD
5.6 Engine | m.2 SSD
There’s a few other threads about a similar issue. These seem to point to Smart App Control being the issue. I’m hesitant to turn it off since it says it can’t be turned back on without reinstalling Windows, but it’s currently my only lead.