4 ms·

Let’s call 1 second the threshold for a bare system with an SSD and 4 core CPU at 2Ghz. That gives you 8 billion cycles to start up, trading off with file acces

Let’s call 1 second the threshold for a bare system with an SSD and 4 core CPU at 2Ghz. That gives you 8 billion cycles to start up, trading off with file access, so maybe only 4 billion of those have access to all the data you need in memory (modern ssd loads what, 400 MB/s?). So all the startup code and initial assets are larger than 200 megabytes and take more than 2 billion cycles to prep? Computers are fast, software is slow. Sure, things aren’t trivial to always fit in that package, but it’s disingenuous to say you need to take many seconds to start up. Look at a giant piece of software that was built for more limited times: Visual Studio. It used to start up in milliseconds back in 2000. Now it takes 30 seconds. Did it really improve things so much to justify that in the intervening years? I’d go with no. You know what else has an amazing set of features and capabilities including internationalization and accessibility and all those other complicated things? Web browsers. And there’s not a browser on the market that doesn’t start up in more than a couple of seconds, including loading a full webpage and rendering it from the internet.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Well, maybe I'm being too harsh on myself. Timing Ardour on my machine (Ryzen 2950X with 64GB of RAM), it has something on-screen is less than 1 second. But actually loading a "significant" session is more like 6 seconds. There's approximately 300MB of data in the session in total, but most of that is audio data that isn't being read at startup. I've seen DAWs start up massively faster than this, though. And also slower. Essentially I have some intuition that "correct" software design would appear to the user as a more incremental startup: the window would appear as rapidly as xterm does, and would slowly fill with everything that makes up the actual program. I personally find this hard to design for. Could be me, or the GUI toolkit I use or maybe it just is pretty hard. As for browsers, "a couple of seconds" has some slop. When I restart Firefox here, with typically 100-200 tabs and the main/primary/#1 tab being gmail (unfair! i hear you cry), I'd say it was more like 5-10 seconds until it is usable.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Well, maybe I'm being too harsh on myself. Timing Ardour on my machine (Ryzen 2950X with 64GB of RAM), it has something on-screen is less than 1 second. But actually loading a "significant" session is more like 6 seconds. There's approximately 300MB of data in the session in total, but most of that is audio data that isn't being read at startup. I've seen DAWs start up massively faster than this, though. And also slower. Essentially I have some intuition that "correct" software design would appear to the user as a more incremental startup: the window would appear as rapidly as xterm does, and would slowly fill with everything that makes up the actual program. I personally find this hard to design for. Could be me, or the GUI toolkit I use or maybe it just is pretty hard. As for browsers, "a couple of seconds" has some slop. When I restart Firefox here, with typically 100-200 tabs and the main/primary/#1 tab being gmail (unfair! i hear you cry), I'd say it was more like 5-10 seconds until it is usable.