"Joining your server takes 10 minutes" is the most expensive complaint a GMod server owner can hear. And it's the one you almost never get, because most players who hit a long download just leave. Load time works like a funnel. Every extra minute of downloading costs you a measurable slice of first-time joiners. Here's where the time actually goes, and how to get it back.
Where join time actually goes
- Workshop addon downloads — by far the biggest chunk on a first join. Every addon in your collection, downloaded and mounted.
- Server-side files (FastDL / net channel) — maps, custom sounds and materials sent via
resource.AddFile. - Lua loading — "Starting Lua..." hangs are addon-count and addon-quality problems, not bandwidth.
- Map + entity init — mostly fixed cost per map; huge maps cost more.
1. Audit your Workshop collection
Most servers that have been around a while carry dead weight. Models for a gamemode you removed months ago. Two or three weapon packs that half overlap. A 2 GB map rotation nobody votes for. Open your collection, sort by size, and go item by item: does a new player actually need this before they spawn? Trimming a collection from about 6 GB down to 2 — that single afternoon did more for join times than anything else, and it cost nothing.
2. Compress what you ship yourself
- Sounds — WAV files are the usual culprit. Convert ambient audio and music to a compressed format and a 40 MB sound folder often drops to around 8 MB.
- Materials — oversized 4K textures on props players never inspect up close. Downscale.
- Maps — prefer maps with reasonable file sizes in your regular rotation; save the 800 MB showpiece for events.
- bzip2 for FastDL — if you serve files over HTTP FastDL, pre-compress them as
.bz2; the client decompresses locally and downloads far less.
3. Fix the Lua hang, not just the download
If players report the bar filling fast and then freezing on "Starting Lua...", bandwidth isn't the issue. Addon count and quality are. Every mounted addon runs its autorun files on join. Pull out the ones that are disabled but still mounted, and keep an eye on anything that does heavy work at load time, like an addon firing off HTTP calls or scanning the filesystem before players can move.
4. You can't make the first join instant — so make it survivable
Even a well-optimized server still means a multi-minute first join for someone on hotel Wi-Fi. Whether they wait it out is mostly psychological. A blank default screen feels broken, so people bail. A screen showing the server's identity, the rules they'll need, and a real progress bar naming the file being downloaded right now feels like something is happening. That's the retention case for a proper custom loading screen — we've written up the data on loading screens and player retention.
5. Measure it — you can't optimize blind
Server owners badly underestimate their own join times, because they test on a warm cache and a fiber line. The numbers you actually want: how long does a first-time join take, what share of players give up mid-load, and did either of those move after you trimmed the collection? Lumescreen's loading screens track this for you. Every load reports its duration, whether it completed, and where it failed to your analytics dashboard, so the Workshop audit above stops being guesswork and becomes a before/after number.