Unreal Engine 4.27 long editor start-up time

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hi!

I’m working on a large AA project, and recently the team has been facing issues with long editor boot times.

The issue we are seeing is that the project can take about 10 minutes to load, even if just loading into a an empty map. The issue is quite inconsistent, and it’s not affecting all team members.

I personally will encounter the issue when launching the project for the first time after a PC reboot. If I then close the project and launch it again (without a reboot), it’s very fast to launch. If I then reboot my PC and launch it again it’s slow. Between these launches I’m not syncing anything with perforce. I’m not making any changes to the project. But it’s still very slow after a reboot. And always fast on the second launch. I’ve tested with and without -ddc=noshared, but it does not affect the issue. I’ve not found any interesting information in the logs, but I’m also not sure what to look for.

I have a Windows 11 setup with Ryzen 9950x3d

My previous setup with Windows 10 & Ryzen 3700x does not have this issue.

Looking at PC performance metrics the system does not seem to be taxed much at all during the wait.

It’s usually stuck for a long time before the small editor launch popup is even shown. After which it gets stuck on 75% for a long time.

We are running a modified version of 4.27, but it’s not been modified in a long time and this performance regression is relatively new.

We are running out of ideas on how to debug this further. Do you have any idea of what the problem might be? What would be your suggested next steps?

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Some thoughts on what this might be. You probably checked this but anything in the log showing up that stands out? Have you tried the console command LoadTimes.DumpReport? It will give you output (in the log) of time loading assets into editor I believe for assets.

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Update: It seems like this might be caused by some windows defender cloud features:

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Not everyone in the team is enrolled here, which would explain why some members are not having issues.

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Hey Anton,

glad to hear you already got it resolved.

Filesystem hooks (i.e. AV-Scanner, etc.) would have been my first guess, or possibly a slow harddrive with the files being cached when accessed after the first usage.

Apart from that there’s certain other things that we’ve seen that can slow down the filesystem, like NTFS Last Access Time Stamps being enabled (which causes a write every time a file is read), but these usually create a constant slow-down, not once per file.

We’ve definitely seen lot’s of reports of antivirus software affecting performance, so it can be beneficial to mark your project or engine directories as exclusions for any running on-access scanners.

I’ll mark the ticket as resolved.

Best,

Sebastian