(Case 1003263) 2018.1: Creating project takes significantly longer than in earlier Unity versions

Creating a new project with Unity 2018.1.0b7 takes almost 10 times longer than creating a new project with Unity 5.4.

• Creating a new project with Unity 5.4 takes about 7 seconds.
• Creating a new project with Unity 2018.1 takes about 60 seconds.

Reproduce

• Create new project with 5.4 and stop time how long it takes
• Repeat this with 2018.1

Observe 2018.1 takes a lot more times to create a new project than earlier versions of Unity.


Expected
Creating a new project with 2018.1 should not be slower than with 5.4.

 

I would expect it to take a little longer due to the modular package manager side of things (just a guess), and even longer still if a project is created from a template that contains other stuff such as post-processing or a scriptable render loop.

On my reasonably fast system with SSD it took about 17 seconds to create a new project from the basic 3D template.

 

and loading a project ... oh boy