according to my experience, you always have to restart the computer when you add the AUs that you removed from the "components" folder to know which one is "bad"
Actually, restarting the plugin registrar process (which is traditionally the way to update the plugin list without doing a full reboot, and I have a nice terminal alias for this as it's so useful) *does* work, in just takes 10 or 20 seconds for the system to update the changes. So that makes it a lot easier to identify problem plugins.
I'm finding though that I think this slow loading is a result of how Luna is handling plugins generally, rather than an actual problem with any given third-party plugins (at least on my system).
For example, the first plugin I found that is slow enough to cause beachballs on Luna load is Zebra 2, which seems to be scanning it's presets folders like in a first-time install, and thus taking a lot of time (about twenty seconds). This indicates that Luna is in fact initialising the plugin when loading, whereas Logic only does this if it finds a new plugin at which point it validates it (initialises it and stores the validation results in the cache). As a result, loading it in Logic takes a split second to see Zebra 2 and make it available on loading the DAW, whereas Luna initialises it in full every time. (Either that, or *Luna* is scanning the available AU presets maybe, of which I have a lot.) And if Luna is initialising *all* plugins in a similar way, it's no wonder the loading process is taking forever (and it's not as if I have a huge selection of plugins - it's a decent amount, around ~500, but other people have way more.) Even just loading Zebra2 properly in a different host only takes a few seconds to load, because it's not doing a preset scan.
Maybe Luna is supposed to only initialise plugins like this the first time, and store those results in a cache or preference file somewhere, and this is not working here, so the plugins are always being initialised - I don't know enough about Luna's plugin handling, unlike things I'm very familiar with like Logic.
Or it's scanning the AU preset folders per plugin on load, which would be slow if that's the case, as I have a lot of these as I save out individual plugin presets as AUpreset files to use in Logic's preset browser.
Anyway, all my plugins work fine, but if they're being initialised from scratch each time, each one that takes some time to init is going to add to the app loading time, unlike my other DAWs, which just build a full plugin list in a second and are ready to go. So all my plugins are going back, and I guess I'll just have to only load Luna very rarely, when I absolutely want to use it badly enough...
