The Old New Thing

The Old New Thing : The end of the scrollbar series: "Raymond Chen says:"
Why is that everybody assumes cheating? The Office folks are really smart. Startup time is all about minimizing disk I/O. So analyze your startup code to death: Track every page fault and work to get rid of it. Delay initialization of everything that can be delayed. (The fastest code is code that doesn't run at all.) Take all the functions that are called at startup and put them near each other in memory so you take fewer page faults. Use the /ORDER switch to do this. If you have a large function and only half of it is used at startup, break it into two functions, the part used at startup and the part that isn't. Reorder your data so all the memory used by startup is kept near each other in memory. With CPUs as fast as they are, disk I/O is the limiting factor in app startup."