4 ms·

I remember one of the versions of PhotoShop (perhaps it was CS2) no longer loaded fonts at startup and the launch speed improved. But then the first time you s

I remember one of the versions of PhotoShop (perhaps it was CS2) no longer loaded fonts at startup and the launch speed improved. But then the first time you select the font drop-down you had to wait around 5 seconds. So I guess the launch was faster but waiting for the fonts to load was annoying when I was in the middle of working. During the app startup I'm probably spacing out for a few seconds while the app launches. I see similar things in other apps. One that comes to mind at the moment is Eclipse where there are certain menu items when you drag over them the app freezes for a second. I always curse myself when I accidentally roll over one of those. Particular parts of the app that require a lot of disk access may have a bit of a performance hit and so it makes sense to lazy load them, but it is a trade-off and sometimes I'd rather just wait a few moments at launch instead of getting killed by a thousand cuts while working.

talmand 15y ago
That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. But it seems sometimes people like to ignore that fact. The key is finding what works best for the particular application at hand. Personally, for something like Photoshop I'd rather have the long upfront load as opposed to hitches when loading a feature on demand. Which, out of curiosity I timed it, the "long" loading time for Photoshop CS5 on my machine is less than six seconds. It think I can wait that long.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. Everybody seems to be missing the third way: load in the background as the user can already work. Take those fonts, you could spend 5s loading them during the splashscreen making the user wait, you could spend 5s loading them when first requested making the user wait again. Or you could load them after the program has started, in the background. Will the user go from "empty document" to opening the fonts dropdown in under 5s? Pretty damn unlikely, and if he does he'll wait for the remainder of the load. In either case, he just "won" 5s.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Problem then is that as soon as I start using the program I might say want to load some data into it which is on the same drive as the program itself. If I don't have an SSD my drive head is going to be spinning around like crazy trying to load resources from different parts of the disk at once which is going to give me slower overall performance. If you do have an SSD then it's likely fast enough either way.
sixothree 15y ago
Eclipse really should be loading those in the background while you are working.

talmand 15y ago

That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. But it seems sometimes people like to ignore that fact. The key is finding what works best for the particular application at hand. Personally, for something like Photoshop I'd rather have the long upfront load as opposed to hitches when loading a feature on demand. Which, out of curiosity I timed it, the "long" loading time for Photoshop CS5 on my machine is less than six seconds. It think I can wait that long.

masklinn 15y ago
> That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. Everybody seems to be missing the third way: load in the background as the user can already work. Take those fonts, you could spend 5s loading them during the splashscreen making the user wait, you could spend 5s loading them when first requested making the user wait again. Or you could load them after the program has started, in the background. Will the user go from "empty document" to opening the fonts dropdown in under 5s? Pretty damn unlikely, and if he does he'll wait for the remainder of the load. In either case, he just "won" 5s.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Problem then is that as soon as I start using the program I might say want to load some data into it which is on the same drive as the program itself. If I don't have an SSD my drive head is going to be spinning around like crazy trying to load resources from different parts of the disk at once which is going to give me slower overall performance. If you do have an SSD then it's likely fast enough either way.

sixothree 15y ago

Eclipse really should be loading those in the background while you are working.