I’m encountering an issue very often in my time with Dorico. It primarily plagues a very large project I’m working in (one-act Opera with 20 flows) but it does also show up in brand new projects.
The issue is that Dorico becomes non-responsive very often in my workflow, pausing, blue-wheeling, and showing (Not Responding) in the menu bar, then popping back after about 5–10 seconds. This may happen once every minute or so and seemingly any action can trigger it—it even happens when I’m simply scrolling through music with nothing selected at all. I personally have not found any one action which triggers this more often or is in common between multiple instances.
I read that some issues may be a MIDI feedback loop which clogs the program momentarily, but this doesn’t seem to be the case as I have no MIDI devices in the input section. And while I’m tempted to assume it’s simply a file issue, this issue does show up in new projects, so I think something deeper may be at play.
I know this isn’t much information to start with, but if any of this sounds like a familiar issue, please let me know. I’ve seen a few issues of Dorico being in general slow and I’ve worked through attempted solutions for that as well, but I feel this is a slightly different problem (and thanks to John Barron for his previous help with general slowness).
For reference, here are my computer specs.
Dorico V3
OS: Windows 10 build 1903
CPU: Intel i7-8550U @ 1.80 Ghz
RAM: 16GB
You know, this is merely conjecture, but I wonder if this is related to an AutoSave which may be recurring in the background? I realize now saving a file is the only operation in common which always sends me into blue-wheel and Not Responding.
It’s possible. Try turning off AutoSave and seeing if that makes a difference (but remember to save manually!).
So far, this seems to have helped a lot…I wonder why that would be? On this large project I suppose I understand, but on a brand new project with only one flow and minimal music, why would saving be a sudden slow down?
It’s not a problem I’ve ever suffered from, even on really large projects. Where’s your autosave folder?
It’s in Documents\Dorico Projects\AutoSave, which I believe is the default location. The only thing out of the ordinary is that my Documents folder in Windows by default I have mapped to be within a OneDrive base directory, but I don’t see how that would cause any issue.
Hmm. Try switching your autosave folder to one that’s stored locally, rather than in OneDrive.
This doesn’t make a difference, as far as I can tell. I’ve let it autosave and manually save twice and it behaves the same. My entire OneDrive is locally hosted on this hard drive so I didn’t expect any difference, but I relocated both the original save file and the AutoSave folder to the base directory of my C drive, completely unassociated with OneDrive or anything else, just in case.
Every time Dorico auto-saves, it has to do a complete save, including writing out the state of the audio engine. Depending on what plug-ins and sound libraries you’re using, this might be quite a lot of data, and if you have a spinning disk drive rather than a solid state drive, it may take a few seconds.
That makes good sense to me. I make use only of the included sounds with Dorico and operate solely off of an SSD, so I’m a tad surprised that saving is such a slow down, but turning off the Auto Save has been a true blessing, so I shan’t complain much.
I may have simply imagined similar performance issues in new projects…I am too busy with a deadline to spend too much time chasing that down, so for now please assume I’m crazy and that this all boiled down to Auto Save slowdowns in very large projects. 
Thanks kindly for the help, friends.