Benchmarks

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