Kepler

I tried Kepler-2.4RC3 a few times under windows 7 and chose "yes" when it ask whether I want to start Kepler. It works for me (no matter .kepler or KeplerData exist or not).

So it might be specific to Windows2008. Kepler start might take a long time so that users might start another Kepler.

My suggestion is to get ride of "Start Kepler next?" step for windows installer. By this way, we won't have unintended two kepler instances.

Removing the option to start Kepler from the installer would be a workaround.

However, the bug remains that Kepler is very slow to start up.

The machine is a fairly sporty server running Server2008R2. I'm running as a non-administrator.

Starting the trunk using "ant run-only" take one minute, 53 seconds.

Starting Kepler-2.4rc3 takes 1 minute 25 seconds.

The first time Kepler starts, is it trying to do anything with Kars that happens only once?

The first time Kepler starts, the actor library is constructed from the actor KARs. I'm curious how long Kepler 2.3 takes to start on the same server. You'll need to remove $HOME/.kepler, and rename or remove $HOME/KeplerData before running so that Kepler will rebuild the library.

My tests on windows 7 on a virtual image shows that Kepler 2.4 and 2.3 have similar start time. For the first time (e.g.: ~/.kepler and ~/KeplerData/ are deleted), Kepler 2.3 takes 60 seconds to start, Kepler 2.4 takes 55 seconds. For following times, Kepler 2.3 takes 23 seconds, Kepler 2.4 takes 22 seconds.

Christopher, you add the option to start Kepler from the installer for bug 4989. Are you against removing the option?

Yes, I'm against removing the option to start Kepler from the installer.

A common complaint with installing software is that it is not clear where it is installed.

The real fix for this is that the splash screen should pop up right away and tell the user how much time the start up will take. A minute is a really long time for a start up.

I'll try to pop up the splash screen sooner. Yet I don't know how to calculate the time the start up will take.

I'm fine with current kepler 2.4 start time since it is similar with that of Kepler 2.3. We can try to improve kepler first time start up time for future versions.

Updating the installer so that it says that the first time Kepler is run, it could take a few minutes because the actor library is being built from the actor kars.

A 60 second start time is an indication that something is wrong. Having the splash screen earlier would help. Ideally, the splash screen would state what was happening.

I agree that estimating the total amount of time for the actor library build is probably complex.

Anyway, if the installer was updated to say something about the first time Kepler is run, then we could push this off to 2.5.

Kepler checks for patches every time it starts, and this can take awhile depending on the network. I moved the check to be after the UI starts so this should reduce startup time.

The splash screen is now shown earlier during the startup process.

It would be nice to update the splash screen with progress messages. However, most of the time spent during startup is performed in the Swing thread, so the splash screen cannot be repainted until startup has completed. To fix this, the long-running startup tasks should be moved to another thread, but we can do that for the next release.

Original Bugzilla ID was 5893

The splash screen now shows a progress bar along with text describing what Kepler is doing during startup.