Posted by Chris Townsend on the DUC: duc.digidesign.com would have fixed this "problem" a long time ago, if it weren't for the fact that it would render existing plug-ins incompatible with the new DSP Manager. As you might guess updating and distributing all plug-ins is an enormous task for Digi and 3rd party developers, and it is a major inconvenience for users. -After some some "real world" session loading tests, the most interesting thing that we found was that Waves plug-ins take a VERY long time to load. For instance, loading a session with around 30-40 Waves plug-ins took about 20 minutes. Where as loading a session with over a 100 non-Waves plug-ins never took more than 2 minutes on my machine. I also found that loading times grew exponentially as the number of Waves plug-ins was increased. Keeping the number of Waves plug-ins below approximately 20 ensured reasonably fast loading times (i.e. sub 2 minutes). -Another interesting thing we noticed was that even manually instantiating a single Waves plug-in could take as long as 90 seconds, even when a shuffle did NOT occur! It turns out that the actual shuffling process occupies a disproportionally small amount of session loading time, so it is not really the main culprit. Anyhow, we were able to make some minor enhancements to DSP Manager that increase the loading time of Waves plug-ins, which should be available in the next major Pro Tools release. -This minor enhancement was able to make my test session that previously loaded in 20 minutes, load in 9 minutes. But for sessions that didn't contain any Waves plug-ins there was no noticeable difference, although loading times were already fairly quick.