All was well with Build 20027. It started up rather quickly. But it seems like every time I install a new version, in this case Build 20032, it take 40 seconds for PhpED to start up. That's how long the "Getting Started . . . " message stays on the screen. Why is this? Why is it so slow to run every time I install a new version? What is causing the delay? And what is it doing for all that 40 seconds time? Thank you.

40sec is awfully slow. It's not something that PhpED would normally do. On a rather old h/w running Intel 3rd gen Ivy Bridge and SATA SSD -- startup time is about 5sec and does not depend on build number at all because it initializes the same components.
I can only suggest to check your system for consistency. May be its AV is outdated and too active, may be HDD is going to die, hard to say without seeing your PC metrics, but for sure 40sec is too much.

The process/phase of 'Starting Up' differs differs from release to release. Task Manager shows disk access which made me simply move the nusphere folger outside ...AppData\Roaming and AppData\lLocal and modified registry settings. That made the difference by upgrading from Build 20035 to the latest 20038. Both releases are based on 64-bit.

My user directory on Win 8.1 is pretty stuffed and the first time the problem showed up in the past was after installing Pharo just for fun, which places the images (Smalltalk) in the user directories by default. Afterwards the 'Starting Up' took long.

Modifying firewall settings made no difference. Once I investigated the startup using ProcMon and that made made me uninstall the plug-ins for Google Explorer and Firefox. That helps but seems to have nothing to do with PhpEd directly, maybe that can slow down the various lookups during 'Starting Up' in the User area.

The part where the user area resides on Windows should not grow to large, because that slows down everything from system startup to anti-virus scan once the system booted and the user (me) logged in. So 'Starting Up is slow' seems to me from my experience more like a symptom.

In all other cases the 'Starting Up' Phase can differ from 5 seconds to 20 or more on a hard disk. I use a hybrid harddisk on a 12 year old still working laptop. At the moment 'Starting Up' cannot even be considered noticeable.

Nothing specific to PhpEd concerning this upgrade. Starting Up does not even show up anymore and the IDE requires almost no time to show up now.

What does PhpEd do? PhpEd checks lots of system settings for example and from time to time access the config settings very likely. Depending if the 'files' or blocks are in what cache I assume, it's really just a guess, the OS has to scan this special area and has to reload the pages from disk. This area is special and growing beyond 2 GB was a problem once and under Win 8.1 more than 4GB or even worse 8GB the slowdown hurts even while booting.

Mike

[quote="a_edwall"]All was well with Build 20027. It started up rather quickly. But it seems like every time I install a new version, in this case Build 20032, it take 40 seconds for PhpED to start up. That's how long the "Getting Started . . . " message stays on the screen. Why is this? Why is it so slow to run every time I install a new version? What is causing the delay? And what is it doing for all that 40 seconds time? Thank you.[/quote]

User area is where applications are supposed to store settings -- %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% are specifically for that. If your disk has performance issues because, like you said, the User area is pretty stuffed, you need to unstuff it a bit or buy a better disk. PhpED like any other app depends on these two directories in User area. Also, it's possible that some other app is monitoring activities in these folder. Try to enable columns related to disk read/disk write ops in the Task Manager, turn it into show processes from all users, then launch PhpED and check what process is doing disk IO.

[quote="dmitri"]User area is where applications are supposed to store settings -- %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% are specifically for that. If your disk has performance issues because, like you said, the User area is pretty stuffed, you need to unstuff it a bit or buy a better disk. PhpED like any other app depends on these two directories in User area. Also, it's possible that some other app is monitoring activities in these folder. Try to enable columns related to disk read/disk write ops in the Task Manager, turn it into show processes from all users, then launch PhpED and check what process is doing disk IO.[/quote]

Thank you for reply.

I know, I know. I clean up this area from time to time. Of course it made a difference in the past. According to ProcessHacker PhpED runs on high priority and pretty fast.

The only application monitoring AppData is the Opera Browser in my case. The disadvantage of changing these directories is that the PhpEd Installer cleans up some settings like tunnels by forgetting/removing the existing settings. Therefore it's not advisable to do so.

After PHPED started it spends some time with activities belonging to the PHP cache file. For me the startup is finished when the splash screen finally disappears.

I already do have a new clean laptop with fast hardware and Win 10. I just wanted to point out the difference and the impact of a bloated APPDATA and APPDATA\LOCAL directory.

I'm not a young bull anymore. So things that take time are allowed to take some time.

What really made the big difference concerning all application on the Win 8.1 machine was no longer being supported by Microsoft and no updates anymore. No joke.

Many thainks for reply anyway!

PhpED Installer does not clean any tunnels. Why do you think it does?
PhpED does not work with PHP cache. I don't even know what cache you mean and why would PhpED look into that. Likely you got some false positives or misinterpreted something. PhpED works with files in NuSphere\PhpED subfolder and below -- the files that it installed for its work. When it starts it checks directory structure and some certain configuration files that were created by PhpED, to make sure they are of correct version. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to work with them. No PHP Cache files are of any interest to PhpED.
Also it's unclear why Win 8.1 is mentioned here. You need updates? It's up to Microsoft to ask for. Their answer will be, likely, -- install Win 10 or 11. I think it's fair because no one would support all versions concurrently.

No no! I don't want updates, the opposite made my laptop faster.

First of all concerning physical disk I/O. Let me say it mit the word of the Pet Shop Boys ... If I look back upon my life ... hardware is the sin. In particular, when the battery of my laptop a few years after the removal of the accumulator finally gape up the BIOS did a reset / fall back to the default settings. I adjusted those settings again and left the device plugged in. At a first glance everything seemed to be ok and the laptop worked more or less fine. There was on setting left in a list of power settings non visible unless the user scrolls down and that was optimize SATA controller for energy savings and not as changed by me years before to performance, since the laptop stayed plugged-in most of the time. Now PHPEd starts tremendously fast.

a) On Tunnels and all sorts of sessions
I moved the directories mentioned in the thread into one of my bin XYZ in particual c:\binphp\AppData\.... Afterwards PHPEd started to startup like a rocket on steroids.

For test purposes I installed PHPEd once again. It's possible that a gave a version with a different bittiness a try, I don't remember exactly. Maybe I removed those settings accidentially too but not manually from the registry. After reinstallation both registry keys (Home, HomeRoaming) were set to it's default locations.

I thins case it's very likely very possible that I mix)ed) up things. But don't care about that or anything else in this post, just info.

c) ... AppData\Local\Nusphere\PhpEd\cache
Those I the files I meant in the cache directory and not the PHP cache. codecompletion.dmdoc for example

After adjusting the SATA controllers back to performance reading this directories takes a climpse of an eye, before it took several sceond.

The problem again set in front of the computer, but just to a certain degree.

My 12 year old Toshiba Sattelite works as fast a new gaming computer for just development purposes. That's why I don't want to give it away or was doing hard to do so until today. As a result of this I do have lots of such binXYZ, for example

binlzarus,
bindelphi,
binpy, // Pythong
binHasekll,
bindabase,
binpharo, (modern Smalltalk)
bininstantfpc
bindb (DBMS Software),
binPHP (for all things PHP)
...
and last but not least
PFRio (Program Files for Delphi RIO)
PFSydeny (Program Files for Delphi Sydney)
(* Woks like that *)

directories and I usually do at least keep a backup copy of settings there.

Now it's all over again back in best shape and glory of good old days to come over again and again, while one new replacement(backup laptop after the other gets replaced by it's successor.

Thank you for your support! Reminding me of the disk brought me back on the right track concerning disk speed. I created lots of Linux Boxes on my computer and very likely thought that this would be the reason for the slowing down.

[quote="dmitri"]PhpED Installer does not clean any tunnels. Why do you think it does?
PhpED does not work with PHP cache. I don't even know what cache you mean and why would PhpED look into that. Likely you got some false positives or misinterpreted something. PhpED works with files in NuSphere\PhpED subfolder and below -- the files that it installed for its work. When it starts it checks directory structure and some certain configuration files that were created by PhpED, to make sure they are of correct version. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to work with them. No PHP Cache files are of any interest to PhpED.
Also it's unclear why Win 8.1 is mentioned here. You need updates? It's up to Microsoft to ask for. Their answer will be, likely, -- install Win 10 or 11. I think it's fair because no one would support all versions concurrently.[/quote]

I’ve had something similar happen with PhpED after updates. It’s probably taking that extra time to re-index files or adjust to any new updates or components in the build. When I’ve had slowdowns like that, clearing out the cache or resetting some of the settings helped speed things up a bit. If it keeps happening, checking the logs or reaching out to support might shed some light on what’s going on. It’s always a bit of a hassle, but usually not a huge issue to fix.