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There have been many cases where people have complained about the time it takes for project scanning (e.g., issue #116477 ). Rather than address this from an optimization perspective, the suggestion is to address it from a UI one. Basically, one should be able to check a box and set a preference for opening projects (or starting nb) that says "Do no scanning." The understanding is that no features that depend on scanning or compiling will work correctly until a scan is done. Thus, matching this preference there should be a control which says "Scan Now" which allows the IDE to catch up when the user is ready for that and also to force scanning when something has changed outside of the IDE (e.g., file perms changing due to the action of an external change management system).
Same goes for task scanning, which also slows things down at what seem to be random intervals.
There is a module on auto update that does just this.