Speed freaks...

I've been working for a client who had a Win32 based application that did some graphics creation tasks for a consumer product. They wanted to update the look and feel of the program and hired someone to create a new application for them. This engineer did a pretty good job but, through lack of personal funds and the availability of a freebie, wrote the application using the C# express beta for C#2.0.

The customer took delivery of the partial code and then discovered that to release it to their customers they'd have to back-port it to .NET version 1.1 and finish up the program. Because of the highly graphical nature of the application and because the original implementation was rather slow they asked me to pep it up a bit.

After solving many of the drawing issues and getting the application up and running we got to the stage where people were installing it to test and everyone who saw it was horrified at the startup time. Some machines saw a 35 second wait between the initial first click and the appearance of the application window. They had never seen a fat .NET app before.

There were two problems with the whole scenario. First, the cycle was to install a new copy of the app, to click the application icon and sit there with a stopwatch waiting for something to appear. This meant that every time they saw it it was going through the process of creating the native image copy for the application cache. Secondly, even though the application had a splash screen this was a part of the application that needed JIT compiling too so often it didn't appear for some time. This encouraged the user to click a second time.

To solve these problems I've tried two things. To make the splash screen appear instantly I wrote a small program launcher that just displayed the desired image and then used Process.Start to launch the real program. This gives the user the feeling that something is happening and discourages them from clicking the icon again and again. Secondly I wrote a custom installer clas that used ngen, the .NET framework native image generator, to create the native-code compiled version of the program at install time. This meant that the first run of the code already had the native image in the cache and reduced load times to the barest minimum. On a test machine I got the load time from 30 seconds down to 6 seconds total using this method.