slow start up Designer ProX

[Ron Duke]

It always takes mine V12 a full 1 minute to open. No brushes preloaded.

[Acorn]

2 sec is pretty fast - get the XDPX365/12 splash in that time but not the opened editor... still there are things going on in the background on my computer

i7 overclocked, 32GB RAM and GTX 980 graphics card,
Acorn

[handrawn]

thanks - that would certainly help, CPU/GPU speeds are significant I would think - my AMD FX is six core 3.5 GHz not overclocked and the graphics is GT 730, the fast version, but not that fast; I should probably upgrade the graphics, but I can't justify the cost at the moment, I don't do gaming and my priority is silence [my GT 730 does not have a fan but a two slot sized heatsink]; the USB HDDs make more noise than the computer does, think I may swap them for SSD's first; the joys of taking serious music seriously

one reason the first load of the program per windows session takes longer is the way my eset security is set to scan real-time - another [I believe] is the way certain parts of the program do not need reloading subsequently per session

[hoja]

i7 overclocked, 32GB RAM and GTX 980 graphics card,
Acorn

Hmm, I run a machine with similar or better specs (I7 6850K oc-ed, GTX 1070, 32GB RAM, fast SSDs, Win 10)
but see greatly worse loadup performance with Xara. Currently I'm away from my machine, but Xara sure needs
20+ seconds to load, whereas Photoshop (a far larger app) opens nearly instantly.

I do have Xara's default file autoloader enabled, but this feature should not be the cause for such delays on very powerful machines,
regardless of complexity of the opened file. Xara should at the very least show the editor window after just a few seconds and then
blow by blow open all files.

I am aware that a lot of operations aren't particularly suitable for dividing workload to several cores but file-loading and saving
don't belong to this list. Photoshop used multithreading for Load /Save operations very effectively more than half a decade ago.
Here, within one session one may open or edit a file while another large file is still saving and being closed in the background.
Xara still becomes completly unresponsive in all Tabs when performing Autosave.

Technically unrelated but contributing to a poor first impression is the fact that Xara doesn't show a proper taskbar file preview on Hover.
I see this failure on two Win 10 machines and have no comparable issues with other graphics programs.

[handrawn]

yes, opening autosaved files will slow it down; be interesting if acorn would confirm whether it's the case for him, I was rather assuming not

[hoja]

He said so before.

Two seconds with nothing open. 6 seconds with a image-rich page.

[handrawn]

ok I read that to mean nothing else open apart from xara - but re-reading you may well be right

also it depends on what document[s] and what size - I'm thinking 'image-rich' for acorn is a web document - for me that would be a drawing document and the bitmaps would be likely be larger in absolute pixel size, not that uncommon to have them right up in the 10,000 range which equates to an A3 print at 600dpi; and a few of those slows things down in my experience when opening a document with them in

[hoja]

also it depends on what document[s] and what size

As stated before, I do not think that having 20 or 50 images open in a file should still matter much.

Even assuming all compressed images need to get uncompressed first and get loaded to RAM, this hardly
can be the bottleneck these days. Modern hardware can shuffle Gigabytes of data in a few seconds and
in the 2012 CS6 version of Photoshop I still use one can see this in practice:

My system opens 500mb Photoshop compositions practically without any delay – with Xara one should rather
not dare loading anything that large.

[handrawn]

I agree I guess, although I am not personally going to loose any sleep over a program taking 20 secs to load, as long as it does not become a drag in use, it's more of an academic discussion here for me regarding start-up

[Acorn]

I have just tried 6 files opened in Xara; one is a 44MB image with a lot of masking.
Under six seconds and all loaded even before the splash screen disappears.

Acorn