Terribly long Kontakt 7 vst loading time with instruments loaded

There are certainly differences in load times once you measure them in a DAW with multiple VST tracks. But I can only speak to my particular DAW which is Ableton Live and in that case I have to completely disable virus and threat protection in Windows Defender to get acceptable times. Generally the first load of the day is relatively slower, but after that it's pretty much consistent with what I had in K6 if I have the virus and threat protection disabled. This same strategy appears to have the same effect if I'm working on non NI systems such as Soundpaint.

I typically work on multiple different projects in a recording session and the load times are pretty consistent once I've gotten past the first load of the first project of the day. I think the very nature of real-time virus monitoring is going to affect loading, and I can't imagine any vendor can account for all the differences in virus monitoring techniques and the effect of how different DAWs load projects.

From what I can see, the major performance differences in K7 relate to the added initial complexity of setting up the more complex new VSTs, but that appears to be a one time price in the case of load times once the shared and cached memory and buffer space gets populated in the operating system if I have disabled virus monitoring. At least within the NI eco system. Once you get outside of that it's more unpredictable given the different sizes of the sample libraries such as the monster sized ones from 8Dio.