LinuxMusicians

When I run VLC Player for the first time (after a fresh boot), it starts really slow. I guess it has to load some system-wide libraries or something, once.

Is there anything I can do to pre-load stuff at boot time?

I'm using Ubuntu Studio by the way and the VLC version is 2.2.0 Weatherwax (yes it's old)

Could it be that it is polling for something that don't exist? loading extra modules? mounting a network drive where your library resides?
You could maybe try to run an lsmod before and after launching vlc, compare the results and add the extra modules to your modprobe.conf.

Try running it from a terminal and see if you get any errors. There is a verbose mode, see https://manned.org/vlc/82327cef. There are command options to do with modules etc if you explore the man pages and the net.

No suspicious output when running from a terminal with or without verbose mode. lsmod outputs are identical before and after running vlc.

I think I will take this to a VLC mailing list or something. I use VLC in combination with qjackctl.

I found out that Audacity actually does the same thing. First run after boot -> very slow.

I will investigate some more.