Would it be possible to get a comment from VE Pro developers on whether this is an issue that should be fixed in REAPER (in which case I will file a bug report with Cockos) or if it's something VE Pro will do differently in the future?
The problem is that using a lot of VE Pro instances in a single REAPER session will produce a long delay for starting playback. I have about 30 VE Pro instances and it takes three seconds for the playback to start. An identical comparison session on Cubase starts instantly.
This might be related to another problem: running VE Pro with decouple off will make REAPER entirely unusable, as it stops to wait for the patch information from the slaves almost all the time. Based on this I felt perhaps also the playback problem is due to REAPER causing VE Pro to request data over the network way too often.
Clearly the best solution would be for REAPER to support VST3 (or the earlier reported Event Input problem to be solved) so only a few instances are needed, but I'm trying to look for an immediate solution. And the session works fine otherwise running with all instances decoupled, just the playback start freezes are a problem.
Specs: VE Pro 5 latest build, Win 7 x64 (on slave machines as well), REAPER 4.52