Rhino 8.15 included some performance improvements for private package repositories.
The yak.exe tool has a new “cache” command that, when run inside the private package folder, will generate an index of the available packages. When the package manager sees this index file, it will use it instead of traversing the directory. This greatly reduces the time it takes for the Package Manager to load when dealing with private repositories with many packages, large packages, or slow network connections.
$ cd X:\private\repo\directory
$ "C:\Program Files\Rhino 8\System\yak.exe" cache
Building cache for local package repository in X:\private\repo\directory
[...]
Make sure to re-build the cache if package files are added or removed from the directory. Remove the .cache* files from the directory to revert to the old behaviour.
We’ve been testing it internally with our own private package repository. For a repository of 150 package files (~4 GB total) stored on a remote file server, the time to load the Package Manager dropped from 1.5 minutes to less than a second.