Since 26.7.x and above can load audio plugins, some indication as to what’s being loaded in the “Loading Plugins…” splash screen would be useful. Especially when it comes to problematic ones. Most audio software I’ve used over the years do this; it’s both helpful and reassuring.
I only updated from 26.4.30 today and was quite confused by Windows Task Manager showing Shotcut at 24+GB of memory usage after quite a significant delay in starting up!
24 GB just to start the application? That is difficult to believe. Read recent posts here about how to enable safe mode to prevent loading external plugins.
I am not going to put this in the splash screen. That does not make sense; it is not readable. I could do the log (View > Application Log). You can do this now by running with --experimental and view the Add-Ons in Filters.
24 GB just to start the application?
Shotcut doesn’t actually start. I let it run for at least an hour and watched the second process grow to that size in Task Manager, the other stays at 4.6MB; so I’m assuming this is the main app and the increasingly bloated one is the plugin loader?
I do have a lot of VST2 plugins in both 64 and 32 bit formats. They’re various audio effect and restoration suites, along with instruments. Some plugins are also hosts, eg. DDMF MetaPlugin.
The article I linked above explains how to put Shotcut into safe mode to not load external plugins.
Yes, the safe mode Regedit fix worked and thanks for that. I posted the Task Manager output from prior to the fix because you said you found it hard to believe that the Shotcut process memory footprint could end up that big. Also thought it might useful to know what Shotcut might be having difficulty with in terms of plugins.
I have a couple of ideas to prevent this for the next version. The 2 processes you saw is because there is a parent watchdog process. Today that only checks for a crash on startup, and I will extend this to look for a stuck startup after like 4 minutes. I’m also going to change “safe mode” to be more explicit to allow or block “external plugins” and default to block.
