Optimizing hip file size - Houdini very slow to load

[Neon Junkyard]

I have some relatively big scenes, ~50mb HIP files, and houdini is starting to take forever to load and save, wondering if there are any ways to optimize both scene size and general houdini startup speed, besides obviously just deleting nodes  (windows 7, SSD install btw)

For example do some nodes like complex uncompiled shaders, COP networks, etc take up more space on disk than other nodes and might be worth some housecleaning, or are all nodes more or less the same disk footprint?

Regarding app load time, and this seems obvious but the more HDAs I install the slower houdini loads (qLib, Aelib, etc).  Is that also true of things like node presets, gallery items, shelf tools etc? Or is that all read from disk on the fly and shouldnt matter?

Then in Maya you can do things like disable 95% of plugins it ships with, disable modules like bifrost, legacy dynamics, mental ray, etc and the program loads infinitely faster, and if you need them later you can just load them on the fly.  Is there anything you can do like that in houdini, perhaps maybe in the .env file? For instance disable renderman, which I never use and clutters up the MAT context?  I appreciate any suggestions

Edited July 27, 2017 by Neon Junkyard

[f1480187]

My scenes usually less than one megabyte. I unlocked couple of rigged characters (default male and female) with geometry stored in HDAs. This action increased the file size to 50 MB. I think something is bloating your scenes unusually big.