That was it!!! Earlier, I answered that I didn’t see any A: drive listed anywhere in Windows, but that was before I looked in the Bios.
Claes asked me to check whether the SSD’s run in IDE or AHCI mode. So, I opened the BIOS and indeed all disks run in AHCI mode. Doing so, I saw a question whether there is or not a floppy drive on A: that was set to YES. I selected NO and rebooted.
Now the gtk2 build starts in 6 s. I will try the gtk3 build next.
Thank’s so much every one for your help. This problem is solved as far as I am concerned.
Yes it was and I am fortunate it was because I don’t boot Windows that often on my main PC. I feel Windows10 is much better that Vista and more like Windows7 which is what I use on my slates.
Programs are normally lively on my setup except for RT. That was before I did a small change in a BIOS setting.
Thanks to your questions and ilias_giarimis suggestion, I found out that there is an option in the BIOS asking whether there is or not a Floppy connected. After setting that option properly (I have no floppy installed) RT now starts quickly.
(Edit) Now the gtk3 and the gtk2 build both start in less than 7 s.
It’s my fault that I didn’t reported the solution in time
@Morgan_Hardwood although the right solution could be correcting GTK behavior by GTK gurus, until then, an item in RT_Wiki and in Rawtherapee.com/Downloads would help …
@rlx009 you haven’t answered whether you tried GIMP or other Gtk±using programs. Could you re-enable drive A and test?
Notable software which use Gtk:
GIMP
Inkscape
GParted
MyPaint
Pidgin
XChat
I don’t know which of those use the GtkFileChooser, so it would be best if you tried several of them.
And another thing. If you edit your “options” file, and set verbose=true, then run RawTherapee from the command prompt, can you paste the log here and mark at which point it paused for a long time?
Sorry, I missed your question. I didn’t have any of those on my main PC since I would normally use them in Linux and maybe I didn’t always have much success in the past when I tried them on Windows – except for MyPaint that works beautifully on my tablet PC’s. Anyway, following your question I loaded Gimp, Indscape and Pidgin on my Win10 PC and here are the results.
By the way the exact wording for the Bios option in my case is “Legacy diskette A” and the options offered are “Disable”, …, “1.44M 3.5in”.
After setting “Legacy diskette A” to “1.44M 3.5in” in the BIOS,
RT takes 4 min to start.
Gimp shows a window right away looking for fonts. Then the window disappears. !6 min later, the main Gimp window didn’t even show up.
Inkspace starts in 4 s and is fully operational from this point.
Pidging starts right away and asks me to open an account which I don’t have. So the test ends here.
After setting “Legacy diskette A” to “Disabled” in the BIOS,
RT takes 6s to start.
Gimp shows a window right away. Then the window disappears. Oh!, there is a thin vertical bar on the left end of the screen. After dragging that and resizing I get a normal Gimp that works fine. On the second try the Gimp window opens normally in the middle of the screen (not at the edge).
Inkspace starts in 4 s and is fully operational from this point.
Pidging starts right away and asks me to open an account which I don’t have. So the test ends here.
I will have to repeat the test for Gimp with Diskette A enabled before I can conclude.
(Edit) Doing the test once again with Gimp.
After setting “Legacy diskette A” to “1.44M 3.5in” in the BIOS,
RT is back to 4 min load time.
Gimp loads in ~6 s. The window is at the right place now in the middle of the screen and operates normally.
The conclusion is that out of those four GTk based programs, only RT is impacted by the “Legacy diskette A” selection in the BIOS.
Now changing PC from my Win10 PC to my tablet PC running Win7. I have RT 32-bit installed (4.1.64) on that PC, and that one doesn’t even show a window after close to an hour ( I started it on the slate when doing those tests on my Win10 PC). MyPaint starts quickly on that same PC. Lots of mysteries…
@rlx009 thank you for the detailed response. One thing I don’t get:
It clearly affects GIMP too. The “looking for fonts” splash screen has no GtkFileChooser so it doesn’t count, but the main GIMP window didn’t show after 6 minutes.
When on googles “gtkfilechooser slow” one finds a coal mine of posts and bug reports complaining about that widget’s abysmal speed. Strange that Gtk+ doesn’t do anything about it, those posts pertain to both Gtk2 and 3 spanning several years.
The first time I started Gimp on Windows, I didn’t see the main Gimp window because it was mostly off-screen on the left. That’s what I believe. There are icons all over the left part of my screen and the portion of the Gimp window on the screen as I saw it on my second try was a thin vertical line which was quite easy to miss. I saw that line the second time I tried because, at that point, I felt mystified and looked more closely.
It happened to me before on my TabletPC that I started a program and the window opened off-screen. That was the first time I met that issue on Win10.
That’s right, my experience is that Gimp starts quickly whatever that “Legacy diskette A” setting is set to in the Bios. RT is sensitive to that setting though.
I believe you are talking about delays when opening files from the Gtk file browser. Isn’t that a different issue than the slow start problem? I ask since I am new to those problems. I did a quick search on Google and found some people experiencing delays on NFS and Samba. My own experience using Gimp on Windows earlier today is that I found it surprisingly responsive, and I didn’t experience any abnormal delay. I didn’t try opening a file on the network yet. I will do that the next time I boot my PC. Well I just tried minutes ago to open a network file from RT on the TabletPC but the network locations are not listed within RT.
We’d need to send you a build with debug messages displayed at various stages while loading to be sure. Speaking of which, have you had time to try the “verbose=true” test I mentioned?
My bad. I also missed that one. Here are the results.
First, about the Gimp test. Why the Gimp window was off-screen in the first place? I think I have some clue.
This PC is dual-monitor with the main monitor on the right and the left monitor turned off most of the time. So any activity on the left monitor might escape my attention.
That PC initially ran Vista and I likely installed Gimp at least once and then uninstalled Gimp but the config file, which is created after the install was leftover. After the migration to Win10 the Gimp config file was probably still there and the new Gimp install I did yesterday reused that old Gimp config file. So if the last time I used Gimp on Vista, the main Gimp window was on my left monitor, that’s where the new Gimp install would start it.
Back to your question, here is the listing you asked for. That test was done after I set ‘Legacy diskette A’ to ‘1.44 MB 3.5 in’ in the BIOS. I list the output of the RT console. I included some lines of the Mingw console but didn’t include the full listing since it is long and uninformative. I will post it if you need it though.
2016-10-10
All times are Greenwich based and rounded to the minute.
My notes are in brackets <>. RT wrote on its own console.
<14:35 On Mingw console>
> (date; rawtherapee.exe 2>&1; date) | tee /d/live/Downloads_Windows/start_rawtherapee.txt
...
file c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\.\profiles\Skintones\Skintones - StudioBase 1 TM.pp3...OK
file c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\.\profiles\Skintones\Skintones - StudioBase 1.pp3...OK
<14:36 On RawTherapee-4.2.1234 console.>
RawTherapee, version 4.2.1234
WARNING: closing this window will close RawTherapee!
< After a couple of minutes. My notes>
**************** FileCatalog::getFilter *** AFTER STEP 1
filter.showRanked[0] = 1
filter.showRanked[1] = 1
filter.showRanked[2] = 1
filter.showRanked[3] = 1
filter.showRanked[4] = 1
filter.showRanked[5] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[0] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[1] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[2] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[3] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[4] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[5] = 1
filter.showEdited[0] = 1
filter.showEdited[1] = 1
filter.showRecentlySaved[0] = 1
filter.showRecentlySaved[1] = 1
<14:38 RT white screen. My note>
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
(rawtherapee.exe:360): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to fetch network locations: Error
opening directory 'c:\Program Files\RawTherapeeMaster\network:': No such file or
directory
<14:39 RT screen all painted. My note>
**************** FileCatalog::getFilter *** AFTER STEP 1
filter.showRanked[0] = 1
filter.showRanked[1] = 1
filter.showRanked[2] = 1
filter.showRanked[3] = 1
filter.showRanked[4] = 1
filter.showRanked[5] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[0] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[1] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[2] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[3] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[4] = 1
filter.showCLabeled[5] = 1
filter.showEdited[0] = 1
filter.showEdited[1] = 1
filter.showRecentlySaved[0] = 1
filter.showRecentlySaved[1] = 1
<14:50 Crtl-Q Exit RT>
<14:51 Exit script>
.