Unity project takes a very long time to load

Hi everyone!

I guess the topic subject says almost everything: on one specific project, Unity takes ages to load (around 10 minutes, from the moment I fire up Unity to the moment I can actually work on it). Now, this is a new problem, which has been getting worse over the course of the last few days, and apparently is specific to 1 project.

Also, my computer is average: it's a 2.66 GHz iMac with 2 GB RAM (I suppose it's not underpowered for Unity). I'm running Snow Leopard, but I don't suspect any of these are the culprit, since this is a relatively new problem.

The project weighs in at around 850 MB, and the final build takes 230 MB. Also, we're using the Asset Server. I guess the more assets, the slower Unity will be, but it's currently unbearable, and loading Unity is becoming more and more frustrating.

If any specific assets are causing the problem, how can I track this down? If it's project-wise, how do I solve this? I appreciate any help...

Thanks in advance.
Pedro.

 

Unity shouldn't take that long to load.

I would actually suspect that you are running low on memory with your 2GB RAM + Snow Leopard + Likely browser, mail, etc in the background so you force osx to push stuff into paging and back all the time.

the only time where you can expect a quite long load is the first time when you convert a 2.5 project to 2.6

 

One way to solve it could be to externalise lots of resources to asset bundles, which are built in a separate project. However that would require a significant re-architecture of your project if you are not currently using them.

 

At first I thought other programs could be taking up too much memory, but even after a cold reboot the problem persists... :?

As a matter of fact, things as simple as loading a relatively simple scene are excruciatingly slow. Right now I tried to compile a build, and couldn't. After a couple of minutes of mad hard disk activity, I get the following error:

I really have no clue what's going on, I'd appreciate if the Unity guys could have a shot at figuring out the problem.

 

You should contact support@unity3d.com about this problem.

 

Thanks andeee.

In the end we figured out what was causing the slowdown and crashing the build process: the use of the Resources folder. Once we figured this out, the project went back to normal.

 

Same here, what you exactly did ?

 

Same problem. But with Celeron Dual 1,6 with Win7.
After upgrade to U5.

 

Hello there well my unity is also taking too much time to load up and it is really very boring so the problem is that when i try to make a new project it shows me a screen of the menu like the assets set and 3d and 2d options and I create a project from there and then the unity just disappear and then i open task manager it shows me that my disk is using around at 65 % and my specs are
i3 1st Gen but 3.08Ghz
4 Gigabytes of ram
Windows 10 pro 64 bit
Intel integrated hd Graphics


Please help me

 

I think that you should close other background processes and upgrade your ram I think please tell me that it works or not.

 

Mine is sooo slooooowww on importing assets, packages, etc. Look at this. Any ideas? I'm not good at the tech stuff. I just know it's sloooowwww.

 

I have the same problem, it's getting longer and longer:

- I have completely deleted my Resources folder from my project and the result is the exact same.
- The first time I load my project at my Windows startup is the worst (something like ~3 minutes to boot up).
- This does not occur on small projects.

What can I do to try and figure out what causes this very long first time on my game project?

 

Same issue here, really long boot time for the editor with some projects. Very frustrating.

 

Same here. And saving my scene takes more that 10 minutes.

 

If something takes too long in Unity, then mostly the plugins/assets are the source of trouble. In my case I have a 140 Gig project, it takes 30-40 sec. Compiling about 10 sec and play mode about 10 sec. I Optimized the compile and play mode start time, but not the Unity start time. (xeon E3 1231, 24 Gig Ram, SSD, NV 970)

I would recommend you to clone your project and try to remove assets from your project, until you find the source or sources of this issue. That was my strategy to find the long play mode start time (was about 60s). With 10 min start time it will take a bit.

For saving the scene you can use the deep profiler for the editor.

Edit: Don't forget to ignore the unity.exe and the project folder for your virus scanner (In my case in Windows Defender).

 

I was having extremely slow project startup times (with a relatively small project!), but your advice about excluding unity and the project from the virus scanner brought it down to 20 or seconds. Thank you so much.

 

Make sure you have enough PC memory

 

Did you find out what the problem was? How did you fix it? THanks.

 

It's random I guess, some project still takes time to load while some projects get load quickly.

 

Any pointers on how one could debug this behavior ? I don't think there are logs on what's going on during loading...?

One of my projects takes 5+ min to open in Unity
It also takes 5 more min to go from editor to runtime (through play button). But only 1 time. All following attempts boots in a normal way.

Thanks for the help !

 

Look at the task manager (if on Windows). Is the hard disk cranking away? It's loading the data from disk into memory. There's not much you can do about it on a HDD. If closing Unity and re-opening it it shouldn't require reading from HDD so much since the data still exists in the computer memory.
Personally that's why I bought a SSD card, to greatly speed up opening up programs like Unity.
Also as was pointed out above, to prevent your virus scanner from scanning the project folder. I also disabled disk indexing for the project, not sure if that helps or not though.

 

@ArachnidAnimal
Task Manager was a good idea :
Basically I see HDD transfer (not full speed though) and increasing RAM. It's just that it seems it could way faster than it does. My project is on a basic HDD (not ssd) it varies from 0,2mb/sec to 2mb/s (it can go way faster than that in theory).
Maybe because everything that needs to be loaded in RAM is fragmented on the drive ?

Thanks for the insight :thumbs_up:

EDIT:

I used this tool to check on speed : http://www.buildcomputers.net/hard-drive-benchmark.html
Random reading (scattered files) is REALLY SLOW on my hdd.
My HDD seems to be a 5300 rpm ( https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/check-hard-drive-rpm/ ).

 

My projects also take a huge amount of time to load. In TaskManager Unity Editor just sits there with 0% CPU, 16.8MB Memory, 0.1 Mb/s Disk. Using 2019.4.3f1. Crazy slow. Before this 2019.2.6 (I think) was almost immediate by comparison. Still waiting...my CPU utilization is 4%, memory is 14% of the total 64GB ram installed, Disks are between 2 and 0%.

Update: I read in a different thread that by skipping the Hub, and just going to the scene file (.unity) and using OpenWith and selecting the Unity.exe, then in the prompt selecting Open Project, set the folder for the project...then it opened immediately.

 

For me, it can take up to 20 mins or be speedy like 7 Mins, I dunno, 2D projects take only 3 mins......

 

I don't really know what happens..

 

I seem to be suffering the same lengthy opening of large Unity projects too (of 20GB Plus) but the culprit looks like Collaborate. It's so slow checking everything. Im on a 350MBS cable internet connection so its not me.. or my kit, 32GB memory PC with a 6 GB 2070Ti and an i7 7800 CPU @3.50Ghz.

Any assistance in improving this "wait 50 minutes and I'll be ready to work", and I'll be very grateful, thanks.

 

This is definitely an Unity issue, my project just took over 10mins to load.
I'm a newbie to Unity and just started playing around following tutorials and such, my project right takes 164 Mb in the disk, including assets and everything. I thought about windows defender but to me this got much worse after updating to Unity 2020.1.10f, before I was using 2019.3 and it was rather fine.

 

When I try to create my projects, it stays at 49.7% for about 5 or 6 mins then stays at 50% for another 2 mins

 

I have collaborate disabled and Unity is still taking increasingly longer times to start up.

 

Just a general comment outside of the specific Collaborate issue. When you're opening projects, the amount of time it takes is highly dependent on the size of the project, additional work required (like if the Library folder was blown away and has to be rebuilt), and the hardware specs of your computer.

So unfortunately it is not all that helpful to complain that Unity takes a long time to start up without anymore information. Because the problem might be because you have your project on a regular HDD instead of SSD (Unity projects typically have thousands and thousands of little files which are hell to read/write on an HDD), you might not have enough RAM causing your OS to constantly need to thrash the swap file, or your CPU might just really not be up to the task. Opening a project which takes under a minute on a newer fast computer, can easily take 20+ minutes to do the same work on poor hardware.

 

New Pc SSD.
No library being rebuilt.

This issue is happening to a lot of people, it clearly is a Unity issue, not a hardware one.

 

I am getting very slow load time, it increases as I start to use new Unity versions, eg: 2020.2.1 takes more time to load than 2019.3.13f

 

I am still waiting. Unity Version: 2020.1.1f1.

 

Oh that is rough

 

I just fond out that installing the Unity Accelerator works, just follow the instructions for
Installing an Accelerator via the Installer, and enable Cache server on unity.

Hope it helps those that are desperate about this issue like me!

 

Make sure that you dont have a vpn on while loading it. Thats what made mine take a long time.

 

Would the Accelerator work on a solo project, or is it only going to improve things across a team?

 

It seems something happened in a unity version after 2019.4.17. The very same project, it opens in few seconds on unity 2019.4.17, it takes ages on unity 2019.4.22.

 

Yeah we are experiencing the same, seems like a recent change

 

With some further research, it seems that the culprit is the stupid windows 10 antimalware that scans the unity project every time you open it. The only solution is to add unity and your project to the antimalware exceptions.

 

Yeah, anti-virus real-time scanning is definitely a pain point here. I use Avira, and just recently added my Unity application directories and my Unity Projects folders to the ignore list - went from ~1m30s to load my current project to about 10s.

 

I made a study about unity the more apps that you run when unity is loding even more slow it gets

 

Thank you!

I recently switched from 2019 to 2020 and installed the latest windows update. So I wasn't sure what caused the problem is. Even a fresh 3D project took ~1min to load.

After creating an exception to my unity projects folder in Windows Defender loading times are back to <10s.

 

If talking about daily project loading at start, and not asset import, I believe that actual "problem" is with new Asset Database solution which comes with new Asset Import Pipeline. As far as I understood, Unity now builds two runtime DBs and keeps them in RAM. One is keeping track of resources in project while another keeps track of artifacts (basically imported assets and their meta). Here is the timelink from the Unite talk that explains this.

It would be nice if anyone from Unity can confirm if this assumption is true.

 

i have a good pc 8 gb ram coe i5 but still it takes forever why?
i need help guys

 

This definitely reduced the load time quite significantly.
It's surprising that the loading time were way shorter in Unity 2019.3 than 2020.1 for me, even with a copy of the same project.
Adding just the Unity related process as an exception to Windows Defender has decreased the load time quite significantly. I haven't added my project folder in the exception list, but might give that a shot as well.

Update
The loading time decreases only if I am reopening the project without restarting my system. However, the project is still taking a long time after restarting my system.

 

I experience some weird things happening:

setup:
- unity 2019.4 and major LTS releases
- good pc ( 5600x + 6800xt, ssd)
- large project (150gb, library folder included)
- Antivirus on or off doesn't matter
--------------------------
what happens:
1) with a brand new library folder (I mean, after reimporting everything) --> 30 sec to open
2) after opening/closing/working/building/crashing/etc for 20 days ---> 5 mins to open
3) after opening/closing/working/building/crashing/etc for 40 days ---> 20 mins to open
4) after opening/closing/working/building/crashing/etc for 50 days ---> 40 mins to open

generally i delete library folder and restart from 1)

The same happen with a 7700k + 5700xt

 

I have a same problem my project is about 27.6GB it take about 5-10 min to load for open,
My PC is 16 GB Ram GTX1080 cpu is i7 8700 still take so long time to load it

 

just close all apps

 

Mine takes over 2 hours to simply load a 2d project - it's because I got scammed buying my laptop I think and it can't even run notepad without crashing.

EDIT: I don't even have any apps open in the background, nothing.