View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | View Status | Date Submitted | Last Update |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0010289 | ardour | bugs | public | 2026-04-18 17:44 | 2026-04-24 07:04 |
| Reporter | boyfriend | Assigned To | |||
| Priority | high | Severity | major | Reproducibility | always |
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Platform | Microsoft | OS | Windows | OS Version | 10 |
| Product Version | 9.2 | ||||
| Summary | 0010289: Ardour 9.2 hangs for 5+ minutes when inserting some VST3 plugins if Windows Regional format is Chinese (Simplified, China) | ||||
| Description | I can reproduce a long UI hang in the official Ardour 9.2 release on Windows when inserting some VST3 plugins. After selecting a plugin in the Plugin Selector and clicking **Insert Plugin(s)**, Ardour becomes blocked/unresponsive for more than 5 minutes, and then the plugin is eventually inserted. This is not a crash and not a plugin-scan issue. In my testing, Ardour 8.12 on the same machine does not show the same behavior. The key trigger I found is the **Windows Regional format** setting. In Ardour 9.2, insertion works normally when Windows Regional format is set to **English (United States)**, but hangs for 5+ minutes when Windows Regional format is set to **Chinese (Simplified, China)**. The setting I mean is: **Windows Settings -> Time & Language -> Region -> Regional format** This is the **regional format** setting, not the Windows display language. Additional test result from my side: if I launch Ardour 9.2 in the Chinese regional-format environment but manually set the following environment variables before startup, the long insertion delay disappears: - `LC_ALL=C` - `LANG=C` - `LC_MESSAGES=C` So this looks locale/region related. A possible regression candidate may be `gtk2_ardour/main.cc`. In Ardour 8.12, the startup code in this area set `LC_ALL`, `LC_MESSAGES`, and `LANG` to `"C"`, while in Ardour 9.2 it only sets `LC_MESSAGES` to `"C"` and explicitly keeps the system locale in place. I am not claiming this is the confirmed root cause, but it seems like a useful place to investigate given the workaround above. | ||||
| Steps To Reproduce | 1. Install or run the official Ardour 9.2 demo release on Windows. 2. Set Windows Regional format to **Chinese (Simplified, China)**. 3. Launch Ardour 9.2. 4. Open any session. 5. Open a plugin insert menu. 6. In Plugin Selector, choose an affected VST3 plugin. 7. Click **Insert Plugin(s)**. 8. Observe that Ardour becomes blocked/unresponsive for more than 5 minutes, then the plugin is eventually inserted. 9. Change Windows Regional format to **English (United States)** and repeat the same test. 10. Observe that insertion works normally in Ardour 9.2. 11. Repeat the comparison in Ardour 8.12 on the same machine. 12. Observe that Ardour 8.12 works normally with both Regional format settings. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Wow, nice find and good detective work! Forcing locale to "C" when disabling translations caused various other bugs notably crashes when loading files in a non ASCII path (due to g_convert_error exceptions). I am curious what happens during those 5 minutes that can be caused by locale.. |
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Regarding x42's question about what happens during those 0000009:0000005 minutes: During the hang, Ardour's CPU usage is around 7%, compared with about 0-0.1% when idle. Its memory usage also fluctuates significantly during the hang, ranging from about 300 MB up to around 4 GB, while in an idle state it is about 100 MB. At the moment, I do not yet have more detailed information about disk I/O or which specific operations Ardour is performing during that time. If needed, I can try to collect more diagnostics in a follow-up test. |
