Indeed. And I did report it to the Youlean people as Paul suggested. Youlean is a nice tool, but certainly not essential to the notation process. I had purchased the Insight VST from Izotope but I think YouLean is a bit easier to understand, at least for me.
It is temping to think of Dorico as a “notation variation” of a DAW. And I think it is completely proper to be thinking that way in terms of long-term convergence of technologies. But it is a rapidly changing field and we do have to be careful about unintended consequences along the way – and inviting problems we don’t need.
For the benefit of anybody in the future who stumbles upon this thread while trying to figure out why their scores are having intense performance problems, let me summarize:
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Early in the project I had added Youlean to an insert in the mixer. It did what was expected, displaying the “mastered” levels in industry-standard (i.e. LUFS) terms. I saw no ill effects and gave it no more thought.
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I proceeded to go many different directions with this score, adding and deleting flows, adding some players and all the other stuff one does during the creative process.
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Probably 3 weeks after I had added YouLean, I started seeing really severe performance problems with this score. I had no reason to associate this with any VST instrument or effect. The symptoms seemed completely disconnected from anything the VSTs were doing, with one exception. When initially opening the Dorico file, Dorico displayed the progress bar about as fast as normal and displayed the notes within a few seconds – a normal time. But then the system would be locked tightly for about 3 minutes. At the end of the three minutes, the HSSE dialog would appear and then the score could be edited. So that much looked to be associated with VSTs or VSTis. I should note that the symptom was a very tight CPU loop that consumed one hyperthread (leaving 7 other hyperthreads on my machine mostly idle,) yet the entire PC was essentially locked up. In other words, this was a tight single-threaded loop that was dominating the memory system.
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What was particularly confounding was that this same 3 minute lock-up continued to happen regularly during editing, not just at open time. I have no idea why this would happen, even knowing that the root cause was a massive build-up of VST data by Youlean.
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It wasn’t until much later that I was able to eliminate practically all of the Dorico elements with the 3-minute problem remaining. That directed attention the the massive size of the Dorico file (26 MB for a score that had no flows and no players.) 7-Zip allowed me to look inside the Dorico container to see that the big storage was vstdata. And Paul was able to tie that to Youlean.
So if you are having very slow performance on a score, particularly with a tight single-threaded loop, there is a good chance it is related to a third party VST effect or VST instrument. In my case, one VST was saving a vast amount of data, but it is probably possible that a VST could get into a similar tight loop without storing an extraordinary amount of data in the Dorico file.
Lesson learned: Avoid all VSTs and VSTis that aren’t absolutely essential to your notation process, especially during the composition part of your project. If you need to add VSTs and VSTis in the later stages in order to accomplish your playback objectives, then do so carefully and make sure you retain good backup copies of your project before adding all those VSTs and VSTis. But don’t include those VSTs in the templates you will use when starting future projects.