On my i5 windows 10 system, RT takes 15 seconds to open. When I click on the Preferences button, it takes 7 seconds for the panel to open.
Is all that normal? (Doesn’t particularly bother me, but I thought maybe someone would like to know, since it’s kind of slow.)
In both cases, nothing is displayed or altered in the meantime (ie., no feedback).
Especially in the case of startup, if it needs to take 15 seconds, it would be nice to immediately display a ‘splash panel’ so that the user knows something is happening.
Typically, startup time should be about 5 seconds. A 15 second startup time is on the limits of normal. Valid things which could cause it to rise to 15 seconds are if you have a large collection of Hald CLUTs and dark frames and flat fields. Non-valid reasons could make it take even minutes to start. Non-valid reasons are for example a bug in Windows/GTK3 when there is a floppy drive enabled in the BIOS and/or device manager.
Preferences taking 7 seconds to show is not normal, it should be almost instant.
Do you have a “Drive A”, “Floppy drive”, “Legacy diskette A” or something similar enabled in your BIOS? If so, disable it.
Do you have the above enabled in your Windows Device Manager? If so, disable it.
Do you have any network drives in Windows?
Does your Hald CLUT setting in Preferences point to an empty folder? If not, make it so.
Does your Dark Frame setting in Preferences point to an empty folder? If not, make it so.
Does your Flat Field setting in Preferences point to an empty folder? If not, make it so.
Thanks for your comments. Here are responses to your questions:
1 & 2: I don’t see any references to a drive A or a floppy. A USB was in the boot sequence; I reduced it to SSD and DVD. Didn’t make a diff.
3: Not sure. I’ve got a router (‘home network’) and there’s sometimes another computer on that router.
4, 5, 6: As config’ed by RT at install, it was pointing to c:\programs\RawTherapee, which of course contains a hierarchy of folders and files. I added a folder there, which I called ‘empty’, and changed those three to point to it. Not noticeable difference – when I click on Pref, I see nothing for about 5 seconds, then the cursor changes to a spinner briefly then the Pref panel opens.
I looked at Resource Monitor while starting RT and opening the Pref panel; didn’t see anything I recognized as unusual. During the opening pause (the ‘15 sec’), RT is top CPU runner.
The panel displayed by Pref->About would be an attractive startup ‘splash’ screen.
I have a machine much as yours, an I5 chip, 8 GB memory, 1 TB hard drive (don’t have a solid state drive) running Windows 10/64/Pro. When I was running W7 on the same computer RT would open in 4 seconds. Now with W 10 it takes 9 seconds, 4 seconds to open preferences.
i7 W10 24 GB. Takes 7sec and 2 sec. (Open and Pref.) My slowdown occured after the program went to gtk3 from gtk2. It used to be better than half that amount of time. Doesn’t bother me, just passing on information.