Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Have you tried disabling the start screen? If SONAR is opening without a file or template, there is no reason for the app itself to take excessive time to start unless some driver or control surface is blocking taking a long time to initialize.
I don't know how to do that - I will look it up and see if it makes any difference.
bitflipper
SONAR takes about 3 seconds to start up here. Loading a specific project, of course, can take a long time depending on how many sampled instruments it contains. I have one I'm working on ATM that takes over 3 minutes the first time I load it after rebooting, but only 30 seconds the second time I load it due to disk caching.
Seeing that lag while the start page is initializing suggests some kind of I/O issue. A failing disk drive could be one explanation, e.g. SONAR requiring multiple retries while reading the thumbnails. As Noel says, SONAR isn't doing any intensive processing at that point. If I disable the start screen, that only knocks maybe 1 second off the load time. If you can actually see that screen's elements being painted then something outside of SONAR is dragging you down.
It might be informative to pull up Task Manager and watch it while SONAR is loading. See what other processes are running and if any of them are eating CPU. Look at the performance tab and see if there is excessive CPU, memory or disk activity. Open the Resource Monitor to find out which processes are using the most resources.
Typically, the day I decide to time it, it opens quicker than usual, but still not what you'd call quick.
I'm not very familiar with what is what in windows, but FWIW here is what I observed...
At rest after boot and doing nothing else there are 10
Processes running, the most significant sizes being..
windows explorer 23,412k
desk win manager 10,548k
the other 8 look to be insignificant to me - much smaller numbers.
Performance at idle
cpu 0-5% max spike but mostly hovering around 0/1%
RAM 1.18GB (of 8)
Plat time from initiation to start screen 1:18 during which RAM remains largely static, increasing to 1.25GB at times
CPU max spike at 41% after 30/40 secs but under 10% for the majority of the time.
Means nothing to me other than suggesting that it could be working harder.
Sounds like my school report !
As far as project times go, it does vary, but always seems slower than x3 was. I didn't time any today, but as a rule they contain mostly frozen softsynths and audio tracks with a few fx, but nothing that taxes even my puny by modern standards system too much. I presume that any samples etc are not loaded into RAM again unless I unfreeze, so effectively they are all audio tracks anyway? Generally I don't leave many melodyne clips open either, maybe one or two, but I always break them up into short phrases so there shouldn't be much going on there as a rule.