Teststand 4.2.1 slow on starting

[seica1]

I have an ACER notebook Intel core i3-380M 2.53GHz, 3GB RAM, windows 7 professional. When I launch TS 4.2.1 it takes 19-21 seconds before coming up, is it normal ? I tryed to format and re-install all the operating system with no time difference on launching.

Thank to all

Massimo Ponte

[dug9000]

How long does it take on subsequent runs? How fast is your harddrive? There are many files that need to be loaded when TestStand first starts up. Cold starts (starting immediately after reboot) are slower than warm starts because the OS caches files in memory. Is this a clean install? Have you customized anything such as search directories? Search directories which point to network drives or which are overly recursive can also make things slower.

Hope this helps,

-Doug

[seica1]

Thank you for the answer, my hard drive is 5400rpm, teststand has all the options to its default. I know that cold start is more longer but for me for my PC HW setup seems to much.

Best regards,

[dug9000]

1) Have you customized anything or is this a fresh install?

2) Is it a lot faster to startup on subsequent runs?

-Doug

[seica1]

yes, it's a fresh (all defaults) installation, the second time takes 5-6 sec. The problem it's only on the first launch time it's very variables and for me too high.

thanks.

[dug9000]

Cold starts can be significantly slower than warm starts. I think even a trivial .NET application will show a similar slow down if it is the first .NET application run after a fresh reboot.

See the section on cold startup vs. warm startup in the document linked to below:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc656914.aspx

Also, see this link for others seeing similar problems:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/clr/thread/c52e87d4-2aa3-4de7-922c-165ad7afe0bf

I suspect that machines with faster harddrives or SSD drives will see less of a slowdown since most of the slowdown is probably due to disk IO (is the harddrive light lit most of the startup time?). That said, startup time, as well as many other performance metrics, are things we are constantly trying to improve, though not everything is entirely under our control (e.g. .NET framework, OS disk caching, OS pre-fetching algorithms, etc.). If you have access to a machine with a faster harddrive or SSD drive, you might want to give that a try and see if it has a drastic improvement on startup times.

Hope this helps,

-Doug