Windows programs loading too slow into wine.

[joewski]

Binary package hint: wine

In the past programs loading into wine ran more quickly at start up. Now program loading under wine have a noticeable wait without any-feedback to the user that a process has actually been started. This typically results in the user clicking the icon again, making two instances of the application start, thereby making the problem worse.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: yelp 2.25.1-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: yelp
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

Agreed, the program needs to either load quickly, some feedback needs to get to the user if the program will take a while, or at the very least it shouldn't spawn two copies if told to open a second time while the original is still loading. I'm not sure where the best place to solve this is, however - a D-bus message to the system from Wine saying "done loading" is one option, but then we'd have to tell the system to wait for that message somewhere else in the code.

[Kazade (kazade)]

Would it be reasonable to (give the option to) start the wineserver process on login? I find it's only slow to start the first Wine app after logging in because the wineserver process is starting. Perhaps that option could be part of winecfg, something like a "Start Wine when GNOME starts" checkbox. - Just a thought.

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

Running wineserver -p at startup does the trick. I'm going to experiment with including this into the upcoming wine-support package that will detect whether or not there is a current ~/.wine prefix at startup anyway.

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

So, manually running wineserver -p greatly improves startup speed of all apps, but it takes about 6.8 megs of memory. I think this may be a worthy tradeoff if the user has a ~/.wine directory.

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

However, this makes upgrade of the Wine package itself a bit more complicated - we'll need to ask the user to logout/login whenever they update Wine so that the old wineserver process can die; if we try to kill it we might kill a running Wine app

[Kazade (kazade)]

Is that any different from the current situation? Surely even now when you upgrade Wine you are still required to log out before the new wineserver starts.

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

Wineservers require separate instances for separate prefixes, and Wine has been moving towards having apps installed into discreet prefies these days (eg winetricks), so I no longer think this is worth doing.