Unreal Engine 5 packaging is taking over 30 min! why?

Development Platform & Builds
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I have a project in 4.26 and when i package in editor it only takes 5 min or so for my project. Yet after we upgraded to 5.1 its now taking over 30min to package why is that?

Also how can we fix this to make it run faster? Its a huge hassle testing our game.

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Hey there @l_l! Packaging takes more resources in 5.1, but usually not by that large of a margin! Have you already taken out all plugins you aren’t using? Plugins often take a large portion of the packaging time.

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Yes we have taken out all unused plugins that we are not using in the game. any other ideas?

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Unreal Engine 5 packaging times can vary depending on several factors such as the complexity of the project, the size of the assets being packaged, the number of target platforms, and the performance of the computer being used. 30 minutes is a significant amount of time, but it’s not uncommon for large and complex projects to take longer to package.

If you are experiencing long packaging times and it is impacting your workflow, there are several things you can try to reduce the time.

  • Optimize your assets: Make sure that your assets are optimized for the target platform and that they are not too high resolution.
  • Use Unreal’s cooked content: Unreal Engine uses cooked content to prepare assets for deployment. This can significantly reduce packaging times, but you need to make sure that your assets are cooked correctly.
  • Use a faster computer: A computer with a faster CPU and more RAM can help reduce packaging times.
  • Reduce the number of target platforms: Packaging for multiple platforms will take longer than packaging for a single platform. If you are only targeting one platform, you can reduce packaging times by only packaging for that platform.
  • Use the Unreal Engine Profiler: The UE Profiler can help you identify and fix performance bottlenecks in your project.

It could also be due to how the packaging is setup. Normally in Unreal Engine 4 you would compile the project once which took a long time. All other times you would compile it would already be somewhat pre-compiled. I don’t think Unreal Engine 5 is setup the same way by default. I would suggest that you look into this as well.

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Elias went over most of what I would have said, if you are building over the older build, I’d recommend a fresh build and then watch the build log to see if you’re running out of memory during the process, this drastically extends build times.

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