Startup time exceeds 10 minutes

Support Client software
1

Hi there,

WhatPulse takes for startup over 10 minutes. You can watch in the Windows Task Manager whatpulse.exe slowly doing I/O (reading). After reaching a certain amount of bytes the main window opens and all is well. I suspected the client on startup reading the entire database file which has 316 MiB at the moment.

I recently upgraded from version 2.3 to 2.4 hoping this would improve performance but it didn’t.

The log corroborates my theory:

23-04-2014 08:36:34.134 DEBUG Database file:  "C:/Users/theHacker/AppData/Local/WhatPulse/whatpulse.db" 
23-04-2014 08:45:13.326 DEBUG Database check:  "ok" 
23-04-2014 08:45:13.326 DEBUG Opened database in:  519255 ms

I think the problem is the mousepoints table which is really large with 5,397,298 entries. Without this table my database file would only be 9.33 MiB, i.e. 97% of the database is the mousepoints data.

Is there a good reason why the client reads this data at startup? It would suffice to read the data only when looking at the mouse heatmap (a progress indicator would be nice).

I personally would rather have an instant start of WhatPulse than a faster mouse heatmap. For two reasons:
[list=a][]I am losing 10 minutes of stats every day because the client does not count while reading the database file at startup.
[]I never look at the mouse heatmap because it’s useless for me combining the coordinates from 3 displays with different resolution ratios in one chart.[/list]
Can you please look into this and improve the startup? Thanks a lot :slight_smile:

edit:
Sry, OS infos: I am running Windows 7 (x64). WhatPulse runs as administrator.

2

Not sure if it helps, but I’ve noticed related, but different behaviors of Whatpulse when starting up and when set to startup with Windows; on my Windows 8 machine it takes a while to start up (in the order of tens of seconds though, not minutes and certainly not ten minutes). It takes a lot more RAM when starting up than when running afterwards though (about 80 MB during startup on my machine, as opposed to 2-3 MB during normal operation).

I’ve had a different experience on my Windows 7 machine, where Whatpulse will crash in the background when attempting to startup with the machine, and require me to start it manually. This problem is significantly more annoying since I want to be able to have Whatpulse start and run with my computer without having to worry about what it’s doing.

In my case these issues are certainly not unbearable but on the other hand it seems like as a stat tracking application Whatpulse should be as light as possible, so I definitely second the idea that startup time and reliability should be improved.