The excellent BBCSO projects that John Barron created for Core and Pro are unfortunately too unwieldy in my 32Gb available ram so I’ve spit them into orchestral sections so their easier to work with. His BBCSO Discover Project I can accommodate in full however. Of course the BBCSO templates themselves need no subdivision since I can choose only the players/instruments I want to add and the templates do the rest. I’m now in the process of putting together a subset from John’s original Core and Pro projects that fit my hardware limitations.
Dorico 4 itself has a small enough footprint so that’s not a problem but how I approach loading samples is an area that deserves more exploration. Kontakt can load 16 different samples. Steinberg’s own HaLION player can keep on loading a new set of 16 samples. Spitfire’s player is one instrument per player instance and OT’s SINE offers a 16 instrument per player instance option. Loading separate player instances must make for less efficient use of ram but it’s the path I’ve presently chosen to follow. I’d be interested to know how others are dealing with this issue?
It may depend on the particular VST; and there may be even be memory management tricks in place where duplication of the executable code is avoided: but the sample size is orders of magnitude greater than the VST itself.
You could see if loading 16 instruments into one instance of SINE Player showed any noticeable different in VST Audio Engine’s size, compared to 16 instances.
What model of Mac do you have? There was a recent thread where someone with an M-series Mac was running 37Gb in Noteperformer Playback Engine (courtesy of BBC SO Pro) perfectly, on a Mac with 32Gb! – as well as Dorico itself, the OS, etc, etc, !!
I see that @benwiggy has already made a suggestion in response to your question. I’m on a PC anyway so better someone with iMac experience answers your question. As an aside let me mention that I use as few instances of sample players as possible although you will find that the OT’s SINE player is actually one of the most efficient in terms of its use of CPU/memory. My objective is more to keep my Dorico projects tidy. And don’t forget that you also have a de-activate option in Play mode.