[Bf-funboard] Loading Screen for Blender

[Matjaz Lamut]

Hello,

I am one of those with less capable machines :) my laptop is in its 6th
year (i3 380m, mobility radeon5650, 4gb ram, hdd, win 10). On first start,
it takes 3s for the console to appear and 9s for Blender to load
completely. On further starts it's 3s or less to load. For my use case, the
splash would show in a meaningful way for the first run of Blender for the
day.

Also, as David Jeske says, with SSDs the problem is slowly going away on
its own.

Then there is the still unanswered question of what benefit this brings to
the user. I understand it can be an annoying question, but User Interface
is all about the user and his/her needs. Any addition should satisfy a real
need, otherwise it's not needed. The question helps to explore and identify
those needs. For example, it was a good idea to ask for benchmarks, we went
from "Blender loads fast enough for me" to "Blender loads in this many
seconds".

Matjaž

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 2:54 AM, David Jeske <davidj at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 5:16 PM, gandalf3 <zzyxpaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On my slightly-beefy linux machine it takes 9 seconds if I haven't
> > started blender in a while, and a little under 1.5 seconds otherwise.
> > (counting from launch to until blender is fully usable).
> >
>
> I can't speak for blender foundation, but to me 9-15 seconds on a HDD seems
> like a long enough time to justify either speeding up startup or making a
> clean loading splash, if someone wants to do the work. That said, the world
> is moving to SSD, so this problem is slowly but steadily disappearing on
> its own.
>
>
> > It's worth noting that on the first run in a while, there is usually a
> > long delay filled with disk activity before the splash screen of either
> > gimp or audacity even appears. I imagine this is similar to the 7.5
> > second delay blender sometimes experiences.
> >
> > This makes me wonder if the delay caused by slow IO operations is even
> > practically progress-bar-able. Chances are it'd end up being one of
> > those progress bars that doesn't move for 10 seconds then jumps to
> > complete all at once..
> >
>
> It takes some time for the OS to load the EXE, load the DLLs, and run their
> inits before any code is going to run. It would surprise me if this was
> 7.5s even on an HDD, but I suppose it depends on how much the DLLs do
> during their init. One way to get around this is with a separate
> lightweight tiny "splash launcher" which has no dependencies and just puts
> up a splash before launching the real app -- but IMO effort like this would
> be better spent making startup faster.
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