.png "Squidly_Man"){kind=avatar}
Per the "VMware ThinApp 4.5 - What's New" article (http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2010/03/vmware-thinapp-45-whats-new.html)......
Back in ThinApp 4.5 VMware released an "OptimizeFor=Disk" parameter.
New package.ini parameter: OptimizeFor
ThinApp 4.5 adds a new optional package.ini parameter called "OptimizedFor" which can be set to either "Memory" (default) or "Disk". ThinApp's new performance and memory sharing features may result in larger package files. In the worst case scenario packages can be twice as large as before but in most cases the size difference, if any, is will be less significant. If disk size is more important than memory utilization and startup performance, you can set "OptimizeFor=Disk" in package.ini under [BuildOptions]. The result of such a change will cause package sizes to be similar as 4.0.4 and lower. In ThinApp 4.5, virtual executable files such as EXEs and DLLs are not compressed inside of packages on disk even when CompressionType=fast is enabled unless OptimizeFor=Disk is also set.
This is primarily because VMware also included startup and bandwidth optimizations in the form of memory remapping to allow for faster starts and more efficient streaming into memory of the package contents.
Startup time improvements
For many users, application startup time is one of the most important criteria for user acceptance. In ThinApp 4.5, many applications will start significantly faster. For example, Power Point 2007 loads approximately twice as fast compared with previous versions of ThinApp when launched from a local hard drive with a cold disk cache.
Time in seconds to startup Power Point 2007, 2nd+ execution, cold disk cache
Bandwidth consumption improvements
Compared with ThinApp 4.0.4, ThinApp 4.5 typically uses less bandwidth to stream an application from a network share during initial application startup. For Office 2007 applications, the amount of bandwidth consumed to stream an application from a network share has been reduced by approximately 50% (half the bandwidth required from 4.0.4). This improvement comes from a new build optimization process that performs static analysis on executable data and arranges packages such that less executable code needs to be present on client systems in order to begin execution.
Example bandwidth consumption (in MB) when streaming Word 2007
All of this and much more can be read in the below ThinApp Blog article.
VMware ThinApp 4.5 – What’s new?
-Dean F.