Disabled Symantec EndPoint and took over 2 hours to install on a Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB from a Dell Latitude E6400 Core Duo 2.26Ghz and 2GB RAM and XP SP3 with USB 2.0 Jack. Is this normal?
New: Run-Command (Dec 2, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
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Most 'normal' 32GB flash drives are incredibly slow when dealing with lots of small files. They are often a mere fraction the speed of a normal 4GB flash drive. The drive's firmware is tuned for large files (>5MB each). The Normal Language set build of LibreOffice 3.4.1 contains 8.904 files in 1,588 folders. The all language set is even larger.
In addition to slow installs, you may notice many apps behaving sluggishly on drives like this.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for feedback. Corsair advertises it drives as super fast but maybe for only large files like you say. The homepage should shot "Install on 4GB or less thumb drive!". But then you have the data issue if have large data files and the 2 usb are too close to each other...oh well.
It's *highly* drive dependent. Some 32GB drives are just fine. Unfortunately, they ALL advertise themselves as "super ultra fast"!
I have a 16GB flash voyager sitting here and just started copying LibreOffice Portable to it (within Windows to avoid any possible installer slowdown) and it's saying it's getting about 40K/sec and will take an hour to copy it. 40K/second is *insanely* slow, but that's because the drive is using basic components and is tuned for large files. My 8GB Kingston HyperX is showing 700K/sec and taking about 15 minutes, but that's a high-end drive specifically tuned for speed. I tried it on a generic 2GB drive (PortableApps.com branded that we gave out at a trade show) and it's getting about 500K/sec, too.
Average price smaller drives are fine. Average price larger drives are often not. And if the drive is then tuned for large files at the expense of smaller ones, you get even worse performance.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Loaded LibreOffice on 4GB Kingston I have had for 5 years of so and much faster.
Sorry for re-opening an old discussion, but this is a big problem for me too.
On my MaxFlash 32GB USB Flash Drive some apps took more than a day (12 hours) to install! [Win7 Pro italian 64bit, Kaspersky disabled every time I use Portable Apps and no other resident program]
Other apps, even bigger in MB but with few big files, took only a couple of minutes...
It seems that it takes the same time to write each file, regardless of its size - or nearly!
I read in another post that the best solution is to use an SSD, but they cost 10-20 times more than a Flash Drive of the same size.
I am not a programmer, so please don't laugh at me, but I thought a cheaper solution, of wich every user could take advantage (even the SSD owners), would be to encapsulate these little files in a big archive, and then to expand it in RAM every time you run the program.
I know this would be a big effort for the CPU and a waste of RAM, but nowadays even the cheapest PC has at least 1 or 2 GB of RAM, and most of the Portable Apps are only some MB in size; on the other side the installing and also the loading (to open some app from my USB Drive takes many minutes) would have a great benefit; and as far as I understood of the Portable Apps philosophy, the app itself is conceived such in a manner that all the settings, .ini and custom files are stored in a DATA folder: of course this would be the only one outside the archive, so that when you close the program the archive has not to be changed.
I said that this wouldn't be a big effort for the modern PCs, but I imagine that implementing such a drastic change would be a BIG effort for you developers... Maybe it isn't even possible, maybe I am only dreaming!
In that case, it would be a good idea to suggest the developers of each original program, to think about changing them in the next releases: for instance, is it really necessary to have hundreds or even thousands of .ICO files, of a few bytes in size (with a big waste of space, by the way, since Hard Disks have to allocate a whole cluster for each of these files; FAT congestion...) instead of a DLL with all the icons inside? I remember, while I was installing one of these programs, I opened an Explorer windows, and I saw them appearing one after the other, as if they came from a 14.4 kbit modem!
OK, after all these observations, let me say that your program is really F A N T A S T I C!!!
I love it, i find it really useful and also very beautiful and handy.
It would be even handier if you could add a little feature, very little this one:
when I download a new app, I find a short description, near its name; but after having installed it the menu shows the name, and the hint balloon gives only indications about version, developer and path. Since there are many apps (and every day you add more:) it happens that I find interesting an app, I download it but then I forget about it, and so it would be nice to find a little description right in the PortableApps.com Platform's menu: short in the hint balloon, more detailed on a sub-menu which opens on the left as you hover the mouse pointer over a name, or elsewhere...
Hope haven't been too verbose, and again many many congratulations to all the developers!
Francesco.
As mentioned, before, it's highly drive dependent. Check out your drive using CrystalDiskMark Portable. Run the full battery of tests on it but pay attention to the last two, the 4K speeds. That's the number that shows how well your drive will perform with portable software. Lots of portable software makes small random writes to your drive. And installing some apps means writing a TON of small files (10k for LibreOffice). Some drives are only tuned for the ability to write large files and nothing else. Some drives have horrendous small random write performance and will perform very badly with portable apps.
Writing everything as a big blob gets very messy very fast. Apps take a *very* long time to start (extracting all 10,743 files for LibreOffice Portable to the local PC for instance) and will take a bit of time to close to write all data back to the drive. So, it's best to do things as we do. True, there are the handful of people with drives with too-slow controllers that take forever to write each file, but that's the tradeoff. The other way around, it'd be slow for everyone.
The menu will shortly have descriptions in addition to the name, developer, version and path in the popups. So, fear not, it'll be there.
Glad you like things otherwise. And thanks for using our software!
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Are you kidding???
I must thank you!!!
First, for your wonderful software, and also for your instant answer!!!
I think that even with commercial software it's hard to receive an answer after 3 hours (2:58"), but getting it from the Big Boss Himself is quite impossible!!!
Again congratulations, and I think that now I will have to buy the PortableApps.com Companion, at least to show you all my thankfulness...
I'm just sorry for the $15 for Shipping and handling
Do you have CrystalDiskMark results for it? (Of course you do). I only found this, but no benchmark at all https://portableapps.com/node/7218?page=1
P. S.
Congratulations also for you beautiful web site!
Francesco.
In a quick test of my personal 32GB Companion drive on my desktop which only has USB 2.0, it got 0.034 MB/s 4K writes over USB 2.0. That's about 2 to 3x as fast as most average commercial drives you can grab in the store (Kingston DT101 is around 0.01 MB/s for example). Keep in mind that speeds vary pretty widely based on the PC you're using.
LibreOffice Portable (Multilingual Normal, no languages removed) installed in under 20 minutes to my PortableApps.com Companion. It's not the fastest USB3 drive, nor is it billed as such. It is the fastest component we could get for a standard-sized USB case without having to move up to the double-wide or double-height cases used by the fastest USB3 drives on the market that have a tendency to block adjacent USB ports or not fit in certain arrangements.
The $15 shipping fee is for the packaging, international shipping (it's coming from Chicago here in the states) and self insurance against loss by our drive maker as many international destinations don't offer insurance anyway. It was originally $20, but we worked with them to more accurately determine shipping costs and average losses to our top locations and bring it down to $15.
Glad you like the site
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!