Benchmark Startup Times of Software Applications with AppTimer
While writing the Secure Computing series, we received a lot of requests to compare each security utility side by side, so let’s take a look at a free utility that will allow you to determine the amount of time an application takes to start up.
PassMark’s AppTimer does not need installation and can run from a flash drive. Of course, this is only part of an overall evaluation of software performance, but comes in very handy.
Using AppTimer
Download the file, unzip, and launch the executable.
AppTimer runs a selected application a several times to calculate the amount of time it takes for it to get to a useable state. For this first example we will take a look at Microsoft Outlook 2007. When choosing an application Explorer opens so you can browse to the software executable to test (outlook.exe is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12).
AppTimer will keep logs of each test result so I created a directory to store those files.
At this point let’s go ahead and run the test, make sure the app your testing is shutdown, just click Run App.
AppTimer will launch Outlook and you will notice information passing by in the Status field, and when completed you will get the following message.
Now we can open the saved log file and see the results which are in milliseconds.
Back to the user interface of AppTimer. You can input different criteria for the tests, for example you can increase the number of test executions, change the delay time, and the way the application window is closed. There is a handy file which explains every change that can be made. The different options might be handy in determining different tests under various conditions.
One interesting test for AppTimer would be to run tests on more intensive applications such as Photoshop. Varying conditions on the computer can also change launch times. For example if you launch several applications then test the start up time of say Photoshop. Take those results and compare them against launching it with no applications running. There are a multitude of tests you can run and compare with multiple system configurations. For the truly geeky this is definitely a fun free utility.
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Why stratup times for a program was not same for repeated tests .I mean it is showing different startuptimes of each program when run it again and again .
Of course its different. Computers don't always (ever?) boot everything the exact same way during each system boot. I think the main thing to look at is how each application is performing relative to your other applications and also to see if you have some program that just takes too long to load in general (such as the old Adobe Reader)
I can't edit my post which is unfortunate, but I meant to change 'boot' to 'load' because I didn't realize you could simply run the applications without rebooting.
venkat.
This is called cold start and warm start. When you start application for the first time it takes longer, than the second time and it takes even less, for the third time. This is because the program you launch is put into the ram and although you exit it, some fragments of it still remain in ram and it is totally normal. For example superfetch service on windows vista (xp has prefetch) does this by putting your most frequent used applications into the ram, so when you launch them, they are actually launched not for the first, but second time. Second loading time is much faster than the first one. That is the way it is.
I think Outlook 2007 takes a bit longer than that to load though. Toss in a large PST as well, maybe an AV plug-in.
I'll take the plugin alone
Loading an application more than once (without rebooting) will show quicker times for each launch (after the first) because Windows doesn't remove DLLs, OCXs, and other program components (EXEs?) after shutting down until the memory is needed. This is by (poor?) design by Microsoft, in case you need to reload a recently used program.