New AppTimer utility released

[David (PassMark)]

We have released a small software utility today, AppTimer V1.0.

AppTimer will run an windows executable a number of times and time how long it takes for the application to reach a state where user input is being accepted before exiting the application.

After each run of the application AppTimer will attempt to close the application in an automated fashion while logging the time measurements to a log file.

It's main use is in benchmarking an application's startup time. It allows the speed of two machines to be compared when launching the same application, or allows two application to be compared on the same machine.

We have been using it in house on some specialist consulting jobs, but thought it would be nice to make it public.

Screen shot

[alexfriis]

Timestamp in logfile would be nice....

Thanks a lot for AppTimer. I could help me from time to time.
I would suggest it to timestamp the log for every set of App.executions. Could be something like:

DDMMYY HH:MM:SS notepad.exe - 1 executions
0.0311
DDMMYY HH:MM:SS notepad.exe - 3 executions
0.0311
0.0291
0.0294

[David (PassMark)]

Thanks for the suggestion, it has been noted for the next release.

[mx30mark]

thanks for the tool Ian.

[alexfriis]

Command interface (suggestion)

Thanks again for this tiny, but useful, tool.
I would suggest an enhancement, namely a command mode switch a'la
C:\Apptimer.exe /silent.
Which would allow it to run scheduled and unattended.
-
regards
Alex Friis

[geekinchief]

Reading Apptimer Log File

I'm a little confused about how to read the log files apptimer generates. If an app registers a time of 1.35 is that 1.35 seconds or is the unit of measurement something other than seconds?

I just opened a very slow loading program (Adobe Premiere) and it registered 1.35, when I know it took at least 10 seconds to open.

[Michael (Passmark)]

The unit of measurement is seconds. It is likely that AppTimer has detected the splash window opening or something similar. Unfortunately it is not always possible for AppTimer to know when an application has completely finished loading. You could try selecting different combinations of the "Window detection method" and see if the results are different. Another thing you could try is detecting a different window title. I'm not sure how Adobe Premier works but for many applications, when you open a file the window name changes to reflect that file name (ie. "Adobe Premier - test.file"). If this is the case you could launch the application in a way that makes it open a small file on launch (small so it doesn't affect the load time much), then have AppTimer set to detect the window name that is shown when that file is open. That being said AppTimer was designed initially to time and compare applications with very short start up times (less than a second). If your application is taking 10+ seconds to load then you should be able to get reasonably accurate results using a stop watch.

[geekinchief]

Keeping Apps from Caching

Thanks. Do you know of any way to keep Windows XP or Vista from "caching" apps so even if you execute them multiple times in Apptimer, they always load as slowly as the first time?

Or is there a way of clearing the cache (other than rebooting)?

[Michael (Passmark)]

Unfortunately not. During our own testing we had to reboot if we wanted to view an applications unchached load time.