Version 1 of Slow Starpack Start

Updated 2010-07-13 21:09:39 by AK

MHo, 2010-07-13: I notice the following symptom with starpacks on MS windows:

  • Starting them from a local drive (like c:\) is very fast ;-)
  • Starting them from a mapped network drives is relatively slow
  • Starting other programs from the same network drive is not very slow

I don't know the reason yet, as I have only started to analyze what's going on a few hours ago... It seems that the phenomen has nothing or little to do with the size of the executable. Sure, an antivirus engine is active and accessing the network drive for the first time always gives a little delay but... it seems that something's going on inside the starpack which slows down the whole "bootstrap" under certain circumstances. Well, maybe the reason is my ugly coding and not the tclkit itself...

Maybe someone can confirm the behaviour in general?

I have to take a deeper look at the output of FileMon and ProcMon.

AK: IIRC the metakit system tries to access its database (our container for the virtual filesystem) via memory mapping for speed, and falls back on plain read/write calls when the access is over a network, i.e. memory mapping not possible.