The earlier the better.
Yes get there before 9am
Go early they have plenty of parking 10$
It's less on a weekday. We went Mon 2/22 and we payed $10 for parking and took about 20 mins to enter the park because of the line. We left around 7 pm and there were still letting people in.
We got there around 4:00 on Sunday and there was a line to get into the parking lot, but moved quickly because the attendance were letting us know it was an hour and 1/2 wait to actually get to the security/temp check point which gave people the opportunity to leave if they didn't want to wait in the line to actually get into Downtown Disney. It did take exactly an hour & half to get to the check point.
When I went we arrived just after 10AM, there was a line all the way down to the U-turn. When we left around 2PM, it seemed like they reach capacity because they were turning people away as we left the parking lot.
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