Impossibly slow file: Figure this out and you will solve many of the speed complaints

Awesome. And let me say after getting rid of that VST, I am making very good progress on my score. It has always been hard for me to keep my bearings in a large orchestral score. What I have now are two large monitors (and a third monitor for ash and trash). On the right monitor, I park the full score zoomed out to where I can see most of the instruments, but the notes are way too small to edit. On the left monitor I keep 5 tabs with custom scores (WW, brass, strings, percussion, choir) Each of those custom scores also has the piano track with chords.

This really makes for a great workspace. I edit on the left side. In each of the custom scores I can play back the section (e.g. woodwinds and piano) which makes it easy to hear any mistakes. And then I can play back the full score on the right to hear the whole orchestration in context.

When that VST performance problem was happening, I couldn’t possibly do this because switching to the full score would lock up the system for minutes. But now the context switching delays are only a few seconds which is very acceptable. And maybe it will even get faster. Life is good.