Quote:
Originally Posted by pollito pito
The issue of calibre’s startup speed shows up in this forum quite regularly. It seems to me that the obvious slowness of calibre startup (and some other of its functions) is quite choking for new users. The community here is one of the friendliest and helpings one can find on the net. However, the zeal takes sometimes the best of some of us.
There is no need to tell a newcomer that the slowness of calibre is just in his imagination, that other program starts just as slow, etc.
Calibre is slow. Period. It used to be really slow, but the situation has improved a lot and hopefully this trend is going to continue in future releases.
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Here I go again derailing threads. Mea maxima culpa.
I'd first like to point out that this has nothing to do with any zeal directed towards Calibre on my part. I'll freely admit that yes, I like the program, but I try not to let that cloud my judgement. Additionally, this of course only describes what my experience with Calibre speed is. That being said, I have to say that, even when looked at on its own, Calibre isn't slow. I have a database of some 300 books, some of them quite large. Apart from loading that database and presenting it nicely, it also does various network- related stuff (lookup of new versions, fetching of news if so scheduled) and loads some eyecandy (the cover browser, I believe). That takes time. Additionally, Python, while elegant, might not be the best choice of a programming language performance-wise. But I think there's one thing that can really help reduce at least the subjective load time: activate the splash screen (perhaps this could be done as a default setting?). I once read in some UI design tutorial that, if your program isn't ready to display a program window after the initial few seconds, at least display a splash screen of some sort. Users are quite content to wait if they can
see the program is working, and I have to agree with that.
Now compare Calibre with the launch time of other programs. Keep in mind that, while it may have started as a small tool or utility of sorts, as of today, it's a full- fledged application in its own right. These things take time to load. You ever complained about your office suite being too slow (and here, I can only speak about OpenOffice, since I haven't used anything else in quite some time)? Or your photo editor, and I'm not talking about paint, but something like, say, GIMP or Photoshop? Even my web browser, on its first start, takes some time to load, and subsequent launches are only faster because it cheats and keeps part of itself in memory.
And lastly, try to understand that there's a discrepancy in the expectation of near-instantaneous startup and features. If you want a feature-laden application, you generally won't get a fast one and vice versa. If you really want to have Calibre launch faster, go and get yourself a few SSDs and build a RAID of those to keep Calibre and it's database on.
I'm sorry, there's no real punchline here. I just had to vent and get that off my chest.