[Lazarus] startlazarus and memory consumption

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:48:29 +0200
Jürgen Hestermann <juergen.hestermann at gmx.de> wrote:

> > Putting a splash screen up stopped all the complaints of "It takes 
> > _ages_ to load". The funny thing it is takes precisely the same
> > amount of time to load to a point of fully functional now, but the
> > users all said "Wow you sped up the loading *heaps*". It's a little
> > psychological I guess. 
> 
> That's true. But instead of a cheap splash screen I would expect such 
> applications to give some information about *what* it is doing (while 
> doing it). Of course, it costs more time to code but to me it shows
> that the programmers take care of the users.

It's mostly loading from disk. After first start when the OS has all
in its cache the IDE normally starts in a second. So most of the time
the splashscreen waits for the OS to load the executable. IMO this is
not a very helpful information, so it is not (yet) written to the
splashscreen.
Of course when the system is busy or the config files are on a slow
network share, then even reading a small xml file can take a long time.
So far I think this is too uncommon to implement a progress bar for
that.
If you have enabled the option to auto open the designer forms, then
opening a project can take some time. This option is on by default to
impress people (aka newbies). I normally turn it off.


Mattias