Application startup times: Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms

Recently I tried to make a little app to track time. It seemed too slow so I switched to Windows Forms.

After that I did some simple tests to see the application cold startup times of some technologies. Warm startup times are pretty similar.

The setup

• PC1: 3 GB DDR2, regular SATA disk and a Core 2 Quad Q8300 CPU.
• PC2: 1 GB DDR2 (not 100% sure), regular SATA disk and a AMD Sempron 2600+ CPU.

• Used Visual Studio 2010 with .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and .NET 2 (for the winforms version).
• To track time used a regular stopwatch.
• There is no I/O or network, just a label in a window with the text “hello startup world”.
• Every test consisted in launching the Silverlight app, the WPF app and the windows Forms app after a reboot.
• The time of the first application being executed after the reboot is in bold letters.
• There are 12 tests, T1 to T12.

Results

Conclusions

• WPF and Silverlight are really slower than Windows Forms.
• Silverlight looks faster than it is because the window opens and the label only appears after a few seconds.
• A splash screen can improve the perception of speed although in slower PCs it still looks sluggish.
• I can’t find a way to improve the performance even after looking at this: How to speed up WPF programs.