How much would a seriously fast SSD help XDP (X10) opening times?

**shiphen** · 31 January 2017, 12:03 PM

Hello

My Xara Designer Pro X10 (64bit) takes 16 seconds to open no files, and 13 seconds to re-open.

My PC is 7 years old and runs Windows 10, upgraded from Win8.1 (which won't be helping!), but it does use an SSD.

Motherboard: Intel DP55WB (MA TX)
Processor: Intel Core I5 750 2.66GHz (Quadcore, 1st generation)
RAM: 8GB = (2GB 1066 DDR3 Memory) x4 modules
Hard disk: SSD 300GB, "INTEL SSDSA2CW300G3 ATA Device" (270MB/sec reading speed)

Does anyone know where the bottleneck is likely to be?

I am planning to buy a new PC running a modern "M2" interface which runs about 10 times faster (3,000MB/sec reading speed), but I am now wondering what Xara is actually doing for all that time and how much a faster SSD would actually?!

The problem is that it seems that Moore's Law has come to a grinding halt for CPUs and 7 years later I am still being offered a "Quadcore Intel I5"!
To be fair the clock speed is 70% faster, and it's "7th generation" which uses "an improved instruction set" (I'm told), so maybe the processor would run at nearly say twice the speed? A fresh install of Windows10 will of course help, but if the CPU is the current bottle neck then it would still take XDPX10 a full 8 seconds to open. But if reading the disk is the bottleneck, it should load in 1.6 seconds.

Any thoughts?

J

**gwpriester** · 31 January 2017, 01:01 PM

My DELL is about 4 years old. I have a Crucial CT500MX SSD and Xara is kind of slow loading.

So I am not sure this would help. There is a lot of stuff that needs to load. For me the DPX 365 window opens quickly but then loading the pages, etc. takes another 5 seconds or more.

I guess I am more philosophical and try not to stress over the loading time too much.

**shiphen** · 31 January 2017, 01:37 PM

Originally Posted by gwpriester

My DELL is about 4 years old. I have a Crucial CT500MX SSD and Xara is kind of slow loading.

So I am not sure this would help. There is a lot of stuff that needs to load. For me the DPX 365 window opens quickly but then loading the pages, etc. takes another 5 seconds or more.

I guess I am more philosophical and try not to stress over the loading time too much.

Hmm... well it looks like your SSD can read at 550 and write at 500 MB/sec (http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx200 )

...So a modern "M.2" SSD would on paper be quite a lot faster (Read 3100 MB/sec Write 1400 MB/sec) than your SSD.
At least something's been getting faster!

J

**gwpriester** · 31 January 2017, 04:13 PM

Yeah probably would. I'll consider it when I get a new computer. Though at the moment, I don't feel an overwhelming urge to buy a new computer.

**hseiken** · 31 January 2017, 11:38 PM

Half of opening your images is the initial render the engine must do. No matter how fast your SSD is, if the image itself is complex with lots of gradients, transparencies and objects, it will still load slow..you can look at your file sizes of nothing but shapes and it will be smaller than raster images, but still take a long time to load...think of it in terms of asking if a Solid State Drive would speed up a 3D game. It might, but not as much as getting a faster 3d card (or in this case, a faster processor). Hope that helps.

**handrawn** · 01 February 2017, 09:28 AM

following on from what has been said...

my experience, having just upgraded my desk computer, is that a combination of CPU/SSD will be what helps - maybe GPU as well but as xara has it's own rendering engine that's not a given

and FWIW upgrading memory from 8GB to 32MB has made a difference to how many documents I can open and edit together in one session, but not to the opening speed...

**Albacore** · 01 February 2017, 10:45 AM

My Samsung SSD opens Designer in about 6 seconds with a blank doc. as startup page. Windows 10 opens so quickly even when you take into account of logging into M/soft around 13 secs. and that includes the log in. Putting in a fairly fast SSD has been bar far the best upgrade I have ever done to my computer. The Crucial SSD I bought at first was OK but had to failures with them so that's why I went with Samsung. After 2 years I haven't seen sight of an error report or a blue screen on closure or startup and long may it continue.

**golash** · 01 February 2017, 01:48 PM

Hi

Two months ago I finally installed an SSD. Over the years I`d buy the fastest PC. Then wonder why it doesn't seem much
faster than the old PC. I was absolutely impressed by the windows 10 load times. But it does seem Xara is the slowest program
to load. But since the software is so much better then my old software it doesn't bother me too much. But again, I don`t do
websites professionally as you can see from my website.

Best Wishes, Barry

**shiphen** · 12 February 2017, 02:22 PM

Originally Posted by Albacore

My Samsung SSD opens Designer in about 6 seconds with a blank doc. as startup page. Windows 10 opens so quickly even when you take into account of logging into M/soft around 13 secs. and that includes the log in. Putting in a fairly fast SSD has been bar far the best upgrade I have ever done to my computer. The Crucial SSD I bought at first was OK but had to failures with them so that's why I went with Samsung. After 2 years I haven't seen sight of an error report or a blue screen on closure or startup and long may it continue.

What speed is your SSD, processor and RAM?
Cheers
J