Very slow startup time on Windows 7 64 bit for electron version 2.0.0

[dough654]

• Electron Version: 2.0.0
• Operating System (Platform and Version): Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
• Last known working Electron version: 1.8.6

I'm currently running windows 7 and tried to upgrade an electron app to version 2.0.0. It now takes ~1 minute for the application to finish loading before it becomes responsive. The same application running on electron 1.8.6 opens in ~1 second. I've replicated this with the base demo app as well.

I'm currently running node version 8.9.1 on the machine under node version manager.

I am starting the application using the following NPM command:

"start": ".\\node_modules\\electron\\dist\\electron.exe main.js --enable-logging",

The same behavior happens after packaging as well using electron-packager

I will continue to use 1.8.6 for now. Just wanted to bring this to your attention.

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[bpasero]

@dough654 is this windows running in a VM? Is this a single-CPU environment?

[baconbrad]

I cannot replicate this. We have Electron 2.0.0 running in production in our company. We have quite a few Windows 7 machines running in our network and none of them are having this issue.

Do you have the same results with a fresh project?

[dough654]

Sorry for the delayed response. I haven't had time to look in to it further, as I just reverted back to a previous version to get some work done.

Now however, we have another problem on our site. We use VSCode for our editor of choice, and since their recent release of version 1.26.0, that application has had the same slow-to-open issue. It's about 25 seconds before a window even shows up, and about 45 seconds before anything is functional. Previous to this version, vs code would be open and operational in about 2-3 seconds.

Checking the release notes of VSCode v1.26.0, sure enough, they upgraded the version of electron they were using.

I've been able to replicate this on a few other machines at the site, everyone appears to be having the same issue.

Our machines are relatively powerful, all running on SSDs i7 Quad Core with 32GB RAM. We're not running anything in a VM, it's all native.

Clearly there is something specific to our environment that is causing the slow down, since I doubt VSCode would ship with that type of slow performance on a major version of Windows.

Any ideas on how I can debug the issue and identify the root cause?

[bpasero]

@dough654 VSCode has a wiki to diagnose slow startup issues: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/Performance-Issues

[dough654]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. Although it's pretty clear that the combination of 2.X version of electron and something in our environment is causing the issue, since we never had performance problems before with VSCode or any custom electron apps using 1.X versions.

Hopefully VSCode's diagnostics might shed some light. I'll respond back later with any results we find.

[dough654]

So I did the diagnostics you recommended with VSCode, and this is what I got.

After that, I created a new app using electron-quick-start, and I tried commenting out the mainWindow.loadFile('index.html') line to see if it was maybe a chrome rendering thing, but it did not help. I then put a console.log message at the top of the main.js file and sure enough it still takes about 20 seconds before the log message shows up.

Whatever our problem is, it appears to be related to something in the electron.exe (happens before the node code gets initiated). I took a look in the task manager as I ran 'npm start', and I've noticed that the initial electron.exe gets spawned pretty much right away. But the second electron.exe process takes the 20 seconds to show up.

We've tried disabling our AV product, with no avail. I'm planning on testing on a windows 10 build soon to see if the issue persists there or not.

Any guidance or suggestions would be appreciated as we continue to troubleshoot.

[bpasero]

@dough654 you could try to measure how long it takes until you get the app.on("ready") event. We have seen in the past that quite a bit of time can be spent until the app is even getting a signal to start building things.

[dough654]

Thanks for the suggestion, but it still takes about 20+ seconds. I put a console.log statement at the very top of the main.js before and that also takes 20+seconds. So clearly the main.js is not even being interpreted until that point. Once the main.js does get initiated though, it takes another 20 or so seconds for the BrowserWindow to finish opening. Once it finishes opening, the render of the html file is instant. Maybe it's having trouble spawning new processes?

It's got to be something in electron.exe that's changed since previous versions that's now incompatible with our environment somehow. Maybe something in libuv?