Lazy addon registration

Archive Python API
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Having enabled quite a few addons, about 10 of them, and most notably “Svertchok” with a superb amount of 400 nodes of them.

Blender plus Addons takes about 5-10 seconds to boot, which is very slow according to my opinion. Having used older versions of Blender to load in a snap, this seems very bulky.

My PC is about 10 year old one and the HD drive is needle (OS is in SSD). I have plans to upgrade though but this speed thing bugs me for a couple of weeks now.

Have you tested something like this on your own, in modern and fast hardware? Is there any slowdown?

If boot speed is one of your concerns, at least I would be interested to explore a new alternative way to register addons in a lazy way. It means that there would be a two-way process to first let Blender understand the types and place them in a list, and then in a thread do lazy registration without paying a startup cost.

I find it very reasonable to have Blender boot in a snap, but then add up 250ms for human reaction time, 1000ms to point to the first menu, then some additional extra 2000-4000ms and is quite generous amount time offered to the user right after the GUI is presented, but startup time is not to be wasted, it needs to load fast. Within that time window there is the a chance to allow Blender do it’s initializations freely.

If this is not exactly a suggestion for Blender improvement at least it would be a good thought to consider using it for behemoth Addons such as “Svertchok”, for small and lesser addons it might not be exactly the case. :slight_smile:

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Some addons are more expensive than others in startup time, and it isn’t entirely due to the number of classes they have to register / number of lines of Python to compile into bytecode. Some have networking and package management stuff, too. For example, I used to keep Radeon Pro-Render enabled, but it alone added 15 seconds to startup due to the networking (I think that was the cause, and that was on a PC with decent hardware, IIRC a couple years ago).

It might be a good idea to go through your addons one at a time and check if a specific one is causing the slowdown… and it’s probably Sverchok! That one is big. And one thing you can do to improve startup time is upgrade to Linux :penguin:, if you haven’t already! It seems quite a bit snappier for me.

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Radeon ProRender developer here.

I’m all for something better in addon registration. Actually I think the slowdown on ours is about scanning devices and verifying compatibility.

We also have a bit of a slowdown on the first load for downloading pip packages.

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Ah, and to be fair that was 2 years ago on a Windows PC. I’m sure it’s much faster today, since the big update to 2.8x.