It's frustrating when the applications you use every day are slow to start. 

The App Start-up workload measures hardware performance when launching a number of real applications chosen to represent the types of app that people use day in, day out. The apps were chosen to cover a range of categories—web browsing, text editing, image editing—and a spectrum of complexity—from small, lightweight apps to complex apps with lots of DLLs to load.

Real-world apps

These applications are included in the PCMark 10 installation package. No further setup or configuration is required. Please see the Third-party software section for application version numbers and other details.

  • Chromium web browser
  • Firefox web browser
  • LibreOffice Writer word processing program
  • GIMP image manipulation program

Implementation

The test has three parts: initialization, warm start, and cold start.

Initialization

All the applications are started once then closed.

Warm start

For each application:

  1. Start the application.
  2. Measure the time taken until the application is responsive. 
  3. Close the application.
  4. Repeat from step 1 five times.
  5. The result is the geomean of the five runs. 

Cold start

For each application:

  1. Flush the system cache.
  2. Start the application.
  3. Measure the time taken until the application is responsive. 
  4. Close the application.
  5. Repeat from step 1 five times.
  6. The result is the geomean of the five runs. 

App Start-up score

We use a weighted harmonic mean to calculate the App Start-up score from the workload scores.

App Start-up score    =    K × (1 / geomean(R_1,R_2,R_3,R_4,R_5,R_6,R_7,R_8)

Where:
K    =    scoring coefficient    =    15823

ResultDefinitionUnitTypical range
R_1Writer warm starts0.9-1.8
R_2Writer cold starts3.0-8.0
R_3GIMP warm starts1.8-3.2
R_4GIMP cold starts4.5-9.1
R_5Chromium warm starts0.17-0.35
R_6Chromium cold starts1.3-3.0
R_7Firefox warm starts0.86-1.8
R_8Firefox cold starts2.0-5.4