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 Post subject: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 10:19 am 
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I'm new to Windows 10 - just installed this month and setting up now all the details in my applications.
Workshelf is set up for the same behaviour as in W7:
Autohide after a short time: on
Icons are locked.

After Restart/New start the icons on the shelfs have to be rebuilt. This takes some seconds, because my shelf tabs are well populated. In W7 the icons were there all the time.

How to keep the icons stable?
Thank You for an idea

BTW - if this has been asked before (multiple times) - I can not search for +icon +dock ...


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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 11:35 am 
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Exactly what do you mean by 'rebuilt' ?

When you open a Shelf tab for the first time, all the icons in that tab have to be retrieved from disk. This is a relatively slow operation and might take some time, depending on how slow (or fast) the media holding those icons is. This can be made exponentially worse if (some of) the icons are stored in a remote drive (e.g.: slow LAN) instead of a local disk.

Once the icons have been retrieved for the first time, they are cached in memory, which is why opening that Shelf tab for the second time is basically instantaneous. But there is no escaping that first time - which is why generic icons are temporarily displayed (and then replaced by the proper icon) if icon retrieval is taking too long.

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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 2:58 pm 
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Quote:
When you open a Shelf tab for the first time,

Well, this is clear to me - if first time means first time after establishing an icon or a dock.
In my case, however, first time is everytime after booting which was not the case in Win7. After wakeup from hibernation everything is ok (because the cache ist still there).

I thought that the cache is part of the program installation (or set-up) and not part of things which Windows handles and hence abandons/deletes at shut down. The program itself will also be loaded from disk at a start of Windows (which in W10 takes significanatly more time than it was (percieved) in W7.

BTW W7 and W10 is currently on the very same machine (dual boot).

It may be of value what is W10 exactly: Windows 10 Pro, version 1903, build 18362.418


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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Wed Oct 30, 2019 7:45 am 
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To illustrate the new behaviour in Windows 10 I made a 13 sec video. See my website
This is the situation with the most filled tab in this shelf after a fresh start (after shut down).
BTW this is very same machine on which i had my Win 7 installtion. For the move to Win 10 i sat up dual boot - which is now reduced to single boot W10.

I notice other quirks in W10 with other applications - so at first place I do not blame Winstep for this behaviour ...


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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Wed Oct 30, 2019 8:20 am 
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You shouldn't blame the Winstep application. what is happening in there is perfectly normal... *except* for the time it takes to retrieve certain icons, but that is NOT the fault of the Winstep application itself.

What you have to try to figure out is WHY those particular icons are taking such a long time to retrieve from disk (for instance, are the RenameBy or RH Resource applications application stored on a network drive? That would explain it). Also make sure your hard disk is not about to fail.

Winstep applications are single threaded. So, basically what happens is this: when you open a new tab for the first time, all the icons in it have to be retrieved. Since doing it for the first time normally implies retrieving those icon images from disk, it can take a very long time (in terms of computing time, of course, not human time).

If the Shelf tried to retrieve all the icons before showing the new tab, this is what would happen: you would click on a new tab and absolutely nothing would apparently happen for one second or more while the Shelf was busy retrieving all those icon images - to you, it would look as if the click had not even registered.

So, to keep the Shelf responsive at all times in a single threaded environment, a lot of tricks are employed. As soon as you click on a new tab, the Shelf begins retrieving the icons for the visible row of icons in that tab. If it manages to get all of them in under half a second, great, if not, it stops fetching further icons and shows you the new tab with the icons it already got, and generic app icons for the rest.

This ensures that when you click on a new tab you will get a response in half a second AT THE MOST.

If the Shelf didn't have time to retrieve all the icons in that half second, it will then start fetching and displaying the remainder icons one by one: fetch a new icon, display it, go back to responding to user input, fetch another icon, display it, go back to responding to user input, and so on... I call this 'lazy rendering'.

Now, all these icons are then cached in memory - the next time you open that particular tab, instead of being retrieved from disk the icons will now be retrieved from memory, which is several orders of magnitude faster - this is why a tab with a lot of items in it opens so much faster the second time you click on it.

Even when it has already displayed the visible row of icons, the Shelf will, unbeknownst to you, still be busy in the background fetching the icons for the next row of icons, the one you will see if you scroll down (fetch one icon, cache it in memory, go back to responding to user input, fetch another icon, etc...). When you finally do scroll down, hopefully the Shelf will already have finished retrieving all the icons in that row, so you won't have to see generic placeholder icons again.

Document thumbnails (images, videos, etc...) are also rendered in a similar way. First the Shelf displays all the icons, then it starts rendering those thumbnails one by one, replacing the icons in the Shelf with their thumbnail images as it does so (in the case of thumbnails, using that cool morph effect).

The above was an explanation on how things happen behind the scenes, so you can understand better what might be happening there.

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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 10:34 am 
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Jorge, thank you very much for your reply. With all these strange happenings in Windows 10 I'm far away from blaming Winstep...
I'm awarae of the various parameters influencening the build up of the icons: location of the icon file at first (they are either in programs from C, H or icon files from D.
However, this is the very same hardware as with the Windows 7 installtion. It is currently dual boot, so I still can compare. There is no slow hard-drive. The machine is equipped with SSD.

There is however one detail which might confuse Windows 10: it is not located in the 'first' partition. There is Windows 7 still sitting in its cage.
ImageThe image shows the situation when booted to Windows 10. If booted to Windows 7, then Q becomes C and vice versa.

Let's pause our discussion now. I will come back after Win7 ahs been wiped and Win10 has been moved to the 'first' partition on the SSD. I'm caareful to take this step not to soon. It seems that some of my hardware (e.g a scanner) does not work in Win10...


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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2019 2:21 pm 
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There must some great difference, how Win-7 and W10 extract the icons from programs to be available for the Shelf-items.
As I told at the start of this thread, in Win-7 the icons where there immediately when opening a Tab. In Win-10 it took up to 5 seconds to get the tab fully populated with 24 icons.
Now I did this:
Extract the icon from the program file manually and place it (containing the usual formats) in D:\System_ddd\icons\ApplictionIcons. The shelf item refers to this location now. Et voila: There is no more a delay in presenting the 24 icons.

'Problem' solved - but I wonder, which service/dll is responsible for this strange difference.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock icons rebuilt constantly
PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2019 7:11 pm 
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Could be your AV software scanning files on the fly, since most icons are embedded inside the executable files themselves.

Or it could be anything else lol

For instance, I just found out that Acronis Active Protection was the reason why Jedi Fallen Order was playing like a dog at no more than 40 FPS here (despite a 2080 TI and regardless of game settings), with a GPU usage that never went above 50%. Disabled Acronis Active Protection, the game went back to 'normal', problem solved.

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http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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