There seems to be an unintended interaction between this mod and particularly large menu simulation files.
Whether or not the option is checked to enable color coded pipes being applied to menu simulations, if a very large menu simulation is loaded, the effort to recalculate the contents of the file is so lengthy that the game can hang for upwards of several minutes, depending on size.

I think this may just be a problem with other mods using very large menu simulations, but is there some practical/easy way to prevent it from being applied to them?

I'll submit a similar request to the mods in question.

Hmm... that's odd. It's true that the main menu simulation code I have could be quite a bit more efficient, but it's curious that unchecking the startup setting does not affect the hang time. When the setting is unchecked, my code doesn't modify the simulations at all, so I'm wondering if maybe there's something else going on here.
Either way it's a good excuse to update it. I'll work on that for an upcoming release

the one I'm using to test with is extended vanilla refining, but I dug open the mod and found they are using extremely dated files, which seem to immediately get refactored on load with this pipes mod on, even if it's just for the menu sim

so I think I can conclusively say not your responsibility to fix, but super weird, I'm guessing it's just all the pipe types

I saved their menu sim file myself and squeezed it back in and it seemed to fix the problem

With today's update, I've overhauled the way this mod updates the main menu simulations. As I write this I realize I broke the setting to turn them on/off, but I'll fix that for the next release. Otherwise, the color-coding process is significantly improved, and now uses the exact same code as the /paint-pipes chat command :)

Ooo okay I can test it

I've updated it and today I've spent a lot of time in the main menu, checking out and configuring mods, and I still had lots of freezes when pipes were loaded.
It might be that it only affects menu simulations from other mods, I am not entirely sure, I haven't paid attention to a pattern, unfortunately.

One affected simulation I remember comes from Extended Vanilla Refinement, the one with a horizontal line of crushers it was, I think. Sorry for being so vague, I just wanted to create a new thread, saw this one and thought I'd contribute what I can.

That's the worst one yeah, I made a new menu simulation for them to use hahaha
that save is just mega old so when you load it with changes to any items in the save the game just poops itself if there's a lot of types to get through. if you need a quick fix you can just open the mod file, resave it, delete it, anything really
the one you're looking for is lategame vanilla array.zip

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but someone is refactoring one of the Extended Vanilla mods at the moment just for fun.
I will make him aware of this thread.

you can unpack the extended vanilla mod zip and delete it and factorio will run with it as if it were zipped
from there, you can open the mod's file folders and look for its simulations, just kill the lategame vanilla array one

I'm aware that the EV Refining menu simulation - apart from this issue - needs an update as it was made in v1.1.
Each time the save kicks in in the menu the game probably needs to update the entities to v2.0 to then apply all the modded content, and this could cause a considerable lag - if my assumptions are correct, because I sincerely dunno how simulation saves are handled by the main engine.
This if we talk about my mod, for the rest I sincerely dunno what could be causing issues.
_77

Great, then let’s just wait until you found time to update the menu simulations and hope that’ll solve it.
It’s just a minor annoyance, as normally you don’t spend your time in the main menu.

Thanks for both of your mods, they are both awesome!