Laptop Performance - Startup Time

[NickSolyom]

I did a test this evening with an old 13" macbook pro and a brand new, maxed out, 15" pro. Vectorworks took 40 seconds to start up on both systems. 

 

Does anyone have a beefy windows laptop (xps or a gaming laptop) to let me know if it is any better?

 

Thanks!

[markdd]

Just did a test too. 28 seconds with new 15" maxed out MacBook Pro with internet modem turned off. 31 seconds with modem turned on (I guess it takes a few seconds to confirm the activation). Don't know why yours takes longer. Maybe you have more plug-ins to load ?

[RussU]

I have a high end pc laptop, and have noticed a very long start up time on first load. I've come to terms with it, as I gather it's to do with decrypting dll files and the like, depending on your licence. Hence subsequent starts are quicker as they're already cached by the system. 

 

vw does a long "ghost" freeze while it displays loading the zone of visual influence vso, so whatever happens next is the significant process.

 

it never crashes, and does open but at rough guess it takes 45secs to a minute to be open and up.

i generally stick the kettle on if im with client. A cuppa always scores brownie points.

 

i don't consider this a bug at all. Just the licence and Protection doing its job. I'll update later with an accurate time. 

 

Edit: Ok... Did a very very fair test. Made sure that Windows had a fresh restart, and any background processes were finished before opening the program. Average time, over three attempts are 1:21 from clicking the icon to opening a new document.

 

I don't think that's unreasonable, but I'll open the discussion to the floor. Gents, please....

Edited February 25, 2017 by RussU

[grant_PD]

25 seconds on my windows laptop. I could probably shave some time off of it if I took out some libraries.

[EAlexander]

Nick - compare 2016 to 2017 start times on both systems and see what happens. I find 2017 takes almost twice as long to start up, so it might not all be hardware related for you.

Edited February 25, 2017 by EAlexander

[NickSolyom]

Thanks for chiming in everybody. VW does seem to be a program I launch multiple times a day, and I am interested in everyone's experiences. Grant, how do you unload libraries?

 

Evan, I'll try out 2016 again.

 

I'm also a hardware junkie so if there are better specs for VW out there I'd be interested.

[grant_PD]

I think you just take the VW files out of your resources to not load them. If you go to C/Program Files/Vectorworks 2017/Libraries/  they will all be in there.  It's just a guess that it would speed up the load time.  But when I watch the startup screen, I see it loading my plug ins, my libraries etc. 

 

Solid state drive I'm guessing would be a big improvement over the old spinners. More RAM too.  I don't know the specs of Macbooks so I couldn't tell you how my laptop (which is 4 years old) compares.

[PVA - Admin]

Vectorworks has a pretty long startup time. Here on my late 2015 MacBook Pro with PCIe storage It starts up in about 32 seconds with the rest of the applications I normally use already running, closer to 28 seconds if it's the only application going and I would say that's about average for my modern machines here. 

Things that can significantly increase load time even further:

 

1) Extensive resource libraries added as favorites.

2) Network stored resource libraries.

3) Network stored workgroup folders.

4) Shared User Data folders.

4) Having a large amount of objects or resources stored in your default document template.

 

To test if any of these things are what are slowing down startup, you can compare your default launch time against how long it takes to launch Vectorworks after backing up and removing your Vectorworks preferences.

 

The large majority of the startup process is still single core and not sped up very much by more CPU cores or RAM (unless you are well below the minimum recommendations, that is) but you should see a difference between an HDD startup and an SSD/PCIe startup.

[zoomer]

Why doesn't VW load these libs after the GUI opened in the background ?

[PVA - Admin]

The tech to do that didn't exist in Vectorworks until very recently, the Resource Manager search does a bit of that via library indexing rather than trying to search the whole library itself like loading does and it's the first users will see of the upgrades to decrease load and launch times.

[zoomer]

OK. Hope there some not too complicated things that can be done in the future.

Don't know if the feedback is so precise but there are a lot of other local things

loading, needing some time also.

[PVA - Admin]

I highly recommend anyone interested in decreasing the overall startup time of Vectorworks vote for this wishlist item:
 

The voting widget can be found at the top left of the original post. (I know most of you know this is how the voting system works, I just repeat it mainly for the many newcomers.)

[WestReak]

Hmm, for me it's kinda strange to measure laptop performance only according to program's start up time. What about it's performance while working with complex models?