After Effects running progressively slower

[dx6channel]

Over the past couple years I've noticed my AE getting a lot slower. The UI seems a lot more sluggish, and the program freezes for a little while everytime I add some plugins like Neat Video (the slowing happens when I add it, not when I have it do any denoising).

There are other little freezes that it does, like when I most mask points (usually on footage over 4k, but even set to half or sometimes quarter resolution).

Sometimes it micro-freezes when I first open a composition, before it previews the first frame. It freezes for a bit, then kind of jumps to attention and renders the frame I'm looking at.

And that is what makes the sluggishness weird. It doesn't seems like a normal "slow render times, need to upgrade ram/GPU", it feels like the program hesitates for a bit before jumping forward and catching up with my inputs.

I'm tried turning off and on multi-thread rendering, changing the RAM allocation, switching CUDA on and off, clearing cache, etc.

Computer specs:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz 3.70 GHz

Installed RAM 32.0 GB

Video Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

I know my graphics card is older, but its still within the recommendation on AE.

AE is installed on an ssd, and most of the time the project file is on one as well.

Any ideas on what I can do to fix the problems.

[ToolfarmJP]

If your PC is a desktop, you add one more SSD as a cache disk use.