Sonar itself always opens in a few seconds for me. Opening various projects can vary with plugins used.
I have noticed this behavior with Sonar projects using several SONiVOX plugins that with large sample sets in the saved presets. Mostly Film Score Companion plugins. I have a template project with 5 plugins that does this. Other projects without these particular plugins load in a few seconds.
Just get the spinning circle forever before anything loads in the Sonar workspace. Sonar is just kind of a blank space with a menu at the top. Eventually the Sonar screenset shows up, but the plugins are still loading samples.
If I monitor with task manager, I can see the disk activity. My 7200 RPM sample drive is locked at 100% activity until everything gets loaded.
I can replicate this in Reaper as well.
I assume that these particular plugins are loading the samples directly into RAM, so maybe that is the issue.