Improve App Startup With Preload?

[JeffRedd]

I just read an article on the internet called “Improve Application Startup Speed With Preload in Ubuntu”. I’m curious about this program.

The article says:

“Preload is a daemon application and runs in the background. Preload analyzes the user behavior and tracks what applications are run frequently by the user. Based on these analysis, it predicts what application the user might run next and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory and hence increases the startup time of the application.”

Is this a program that any of you use? I really don’t have slow load-up times for any software (except for LibreOffice) but faster is always better isn’t it?

Let me know what you think. I would especially like to hear from anyone who has used this and has had a positive/negative experience.

Thanks in advance.

[claydoh]

Link?

Preload used to be a thing discussed somewhat often back in the olden times of single/dual core sorts of systems on spinning rust hard drives. Not sure if it makes a noticeable difference today.
preload of course just loads things early -- adding to the boot or login time, iirc, and would use more ram up front.

This has no effect on appimages, flatpaks, or snaps.
Here is an olld post on why it might not be useful for many.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I don't think you will notice a big difference (if any) in day-to-day usage on a modern desktop system with an M.2 NVMe SSD (or even an SATA SSD) and it is not useful for any use case anyway.
It made more sense in certain cases when HDDs were the standard and processors had few cores, like certain I/O schedulers did…

But: just try it, measure the observations as scientificly as possible and let us know!
If you don't need it anymore, just purge it afterwards.

[JeffRedd]

I agree with you Kater. I think if it was something great we would have heard more about it and the reviews I read were mixed at best. I might try it but I can’t find a webpage or homepage but he was on sourceforge.net. It looks like has not gotten an update since 05-13-2013. I prefer more up to date applications. I’m not sure if it has much of a future. Thanks for your reply.

[JeffRedd]

Link?

Preload used to be a thing discussed somewhat often back in the olden times of single/dual core sorts of systems on spinning rust hard drives. Not sure if it makes a noticeable difference today. preload of course just loads things early -- adding to the boot or login time, iirc, and would use more ram up front. This has no effect on appimages, flatpaks, or snaps.
Here is an olld post on why it might not be useful for many.

I didn’t include the link because it was a spammed filled website that didn’t include much more than what I posted. But I will include the website. Well I read what you had to say. Maybe it’s just a wash? Looks like it was made for older systems. I guess the only I’d really know is if I installed it myself. Thanks for your response. I did read the link and it had mixed reviews.

[JeffRedd]

Here is a diagram however I unable to guarantee the accuracy of this graph but it was on the website you refered me to.

[Schwarzer Kater]

This diagram does not mean much without any context like the exact hardware that was used, how else the system was configured and how the times were measured…
It also does not say anything else, e.g. memory, cache or swap usage, CPU usage etc.
Also no information about the test arrangement is given (like number of repetitions).

[claydoh]

Here is a diagram however I unable to guarantee the accuracy of this graph but it was on the website you refered me to.

And note the dates on the post and comments.....

There are a fair to large number of websites that simply regurgitate/borrow/steal content form other sources. Even better quality and ad-free ones do this a fair amount.

I did sort of overlook that ancient graph - note the login time, this is NOT boot time, but time from entering your password and getting to a desktop. And if LO took 15 seconds to load..... there would be heck to pay lol
Even Firefox as a snap, on a spinning drive on a 10+ year old laptop doesn't take that long to load the first time (I checked at some point in the past).