Hi,

In your 'warm start' experience you have the advantage of several layers of caching.

First of all there is the file access cache, which on a 'idle' system will be containing quite a lot of the recently accessed storage. Idle in this case is a normal stand-alone system, that did not have any other operations (applications) loaded between sessions. To eliminate this, you could start some other programs between your first and second test start.

Next on a second start of the application the 'route' to the server you want to start the application from will be established. You will be fully authenticated and the server knows you. Most likely the server also has the files accessed in his 'file cache'. To make the test similar you could access the server and copy the exe (not start it, copy it) so the server might have the app in cache as well (and you are fully authenticated). Second could be to disconnect from the server (simplest: restart server) before the second run.

At last it might still be that there are some background processes active that keep the application 'in memory'. mdm and ctfmon are the most common annoyances for this. try to delete the sandbox. if you fail: app is still active! In that case a 2nd start will be a lot faster.

Of course you have the same test conditions created... i assume... Initializing the sandbox costs some time... Delete it for both tests.

Do all of the above and you will see the times will become quite comparable.

Kind regards,
Michael Baars

Just some thoughts about this scenario. So natively installed Office will launch faster than a ThinApped one. This is a fact. But what do you gain in ThinApping it? If you stream the package you will save disk space (very important in a VDI scenario). OS stability, having the applications ThinApped will leave your OS clean and therefore much more stable. Boot time.. Having no applications installed will make the OS start much faster. Run performance, we all know that a clean OS without a lot installed runs much faster than one with a lot applications installed.

I think it is important to see the big picture and not only execution time. If your machine is more stable (lesser reboots) and it starts much faster and runs much faster you might at the end of the day save time running the apps ThinApped.

If MS Office should be ThinApped or not is a great discussion with no right or wrong answer. Most of the times Office ends up on the image because so many applications use Office so having it packaged forces you to AppLink a lot.