Some months past, the new updates to Sonar were presented as allowing the program to start up faster. However, in my updates, startup appears to have regressed backwards.
For some reason, Sonar now can take up to two minutes to open from the clicking on it's icon. Now this is obviously something to do with my system, but what?
Can anybody offer a suggestion as to the cause of this behavior?

Do you have internet connection on this PC?
I have the same problem. If my Internet fails it takes up to 2 minutes to start SONAR without any project. In some cases Sonar is apparently looking for the internet connection to verify the license.
 

My DAW is never connected to the internet at bootup and takes about 5 seconds, so it's not that.

THambrecht
Do you have internet connection on this PC?
I have the same problem. If my Internet fails it takes up to 2 minutes to start SONAR without any project. In some cases Sonar is apparently looking for the internet connection to verify the license.
 

Yes, I am permanently  connected to the internet, but it's  a wireless connection.
Something to try I guess.
 

have you opened up task manager to see if something is drawing resources ?
it might even be your audio interface trying to connect.
try another usb/FW port if possible.
 
it could also be RAM going bad, how old is the pc ?
 
 
Quick note:
if sonar project is heavey with a lot of soft synths, plug ins, it takes longer to load.
it could also be a plug in failing to open properly. what happens on new projects ?

Are you running an SSD? 
If so there could be some slow blocks.  They can start to fail in a strange way which is to take eons to do a read.
One of our devs had it happen on his development machine where link times suddenly went from taking 30 seconds to 30 minutes!
How to spot this?
 
Grab a demo of HD Tune Pro or other disk utils like it, click the Error Checking tab, and run the handy Speed Map.
http://www.hdtune.com/
Anything in red is slow and potentially indicating a need to consider a new SSD.
In the interim, make sure the SSD has sufficient free space so it can better wear balance that may get you some extra usage.
 
Keith
 

Tried a few options to see what would happen.
 
I've been having another problem as well, in that windows would sometimes hang at boot up. Went into task manager and removed a couple of things that were loading at the same time, and the situation has appeared to improve somewhat.
 
I have also changed my boot procedure. Previously I would boot Windows, and while it was loading, I would switch on the Roland Octa-Capture and wait. Now I wait till Windows is fully up before switching on the interface. Seems to have helped.
 
Not 5 seconds, but tolerable, so far. I will run like this for a while and see what happens.
 
Cheers all.

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
 
Grab a demo of HD Tune Pro or other disk utils like it, click the Error Checking tab, and run the handy Speed Map.
http://www.hdtune.com/
Anything in red is slow and potentially indicating a need to consider a new SSD.
In the interim, make sure the SSD has sufficient free space so it can better wear balance that may get you some extra usage.
 

Need to chime in on this thread, since suddenly Splat (Manchester) went from 5 seconds to load to about 40 seconds. SSD is older than dirt (5+ years) and only 15GB free of the 223GB available. I may be pinching its ability to page file, but wanted to run this utility first.
 
Update - All blocks are okay, but info page showed 7 had been retired with data moved from them, so the SSD has been pruning itself over time.
 
Actual culprit was "ReWireBridge32" I had installed from a post months ago. Found it by watching processes initiate during the Splat launch. Good grief... I have never even used rewire, so not sure what possessed me to install that. Initial launch of Splat now 4 seconds, repeat launch is about 1.5, all is good (yay).

If rewire is installed, at startup SONAR will load rewire components for all rewire registered apps.
eg, reason, reaper etc. Depending on what those components do (authorization, initialization, etc) it will slow down the load.
Also any attached control surfaces will slow down the load since they handshake with SONAR.
Additionally if you have rescan failed or rescan existing VST's set in preferences it can slow down the start process even though scanning is in the background, since the scanner sends update messages to SONAR.
Some audio interfaces can also take time to initialize.
 
The best thing to do when troubleshooting load issues is to eliminate these first and see if they are contributing to the issue. On my Surface pro, and also on my DAW startup is less than 4 seconds to the time I see the start page.

Thanks Noel, that is good information for folks to know.
 
The very odd thing is I loaded that program a while ago (May, I think) and never saw an issue afterwards to the extent recently, but suddenly (not sure if I did something to trigger this) the load time jumped through the roof. The really interesting thing is that not only did that rewire jump up as a process, but it did it twice (thankfully it was named identical to the file I needed to get rid of). Pause... process appeared... pause... process appeared again... pause... SONAR loaded. It may have been triggered from loading iZotope stuff this weekend (although I VST scan manually), so I was installing, demoing, installing more, etc., but closing and reopening SONAR each time out of habit. I guess it is possible the installations played into this, but the effect of that ReWire lingered even after all had been completed.