Close project / quit Cubase taking a long time

Cubase
#1

I have a few big project with a lot of Kontakt 6 (player) and East West Play instances. They take a long time to open (5-6 minutes) but that’s somewhat expected. What’s more surprising is that it takes a really long time for Cubase to exit (or to close the project) with one of these loaded. For the largest project (~50 Play instances, ~20 Kontakt) it takes 14:45; over twice as long as opening. That project uses ~135GB of RAM, so I understand it needs time to free up all that memory, but I would not expect it to take that much longer than allocating the memory plus loading all the plugins/mixer/etc. at startup.

I’ve seen a few references to issues like this on the forum here but no real conclusions, so I have a couple of questions:

1.) Is this expected/normal?

2.) Are there any steps that can be taken to speed it up?

#2

1: Normal - Yes, Expected - Not really
2: Render your VSTi to audio when you are finish writing the song.

#3

People who work with large templates like this usually use VEPro. That way you don’t have to wait for all the instruments to unload/reload when you open and close projects.

#4

I’d prefer not to have to go to VE pro and deal with extra complexity and possible latency.

Sooo, what happens if I just “End Task” Cubase? I’m a little afraid to try it; I don’t want to screw anything up, but is anyone doing that regularly?

#5

I’m on Mac . Used to do this with me a lot on 10.0. I found it was saving the project to somewhere it didn’t like, sorted it in the end.Use default save locations.
If you want , save your file then End Task or Force Quit ( mac). It was always Ok with me but you sound like you have a humongous size project.