using (var session = Sikuli.CreateSession()) take a lot of time

[condaa]

Console.WriteLine("Ready!");
using (var session = Sikuli.CreateSession())
{
   Console.WriteLine("Entered!");
   // Do stuff
}

To go from "Ready!" to "Entered!" it takes about 8 seconds to just create the session, Can I optimize that?

[christianrondeau]

That is a very good question; I'd say: not easily. Check on your maching how much time does it takes to launch a command line, launch the Sikuli repl jar and wait for the prompt to show up; this is the baseline based on the approach I use. There might be ways to accelerate the Java app loading time, but I'm not aware of them.

Without a native C# implementation of Sikuli (this is a wrapper), we're bound by the performance of the underlying program. Note that the interop itself should be fairly minimal.

[SephirXV]

I tried getting around by wrapping the wrapper to allow calling it to lazy create the session if not already, but also to load in background.
So I start session, load/process other stuff while waiting, but in effect it still has to sit waiting most of that time, who has 8 seconds worth of stuff to do before starting?

[christianrondeau]

Haha, agreed, seconds are precious :) The session is already "lazy loaded", in fact. When you create a new session, the process is started, and then we simply wait for the process to be ready (line _asyncTwoWayStreamsHandler.ReadUntil(SikuliReadyTimeoutSeconds, InteractiveConsoleReadyMarker);). It would be possible to keep an initialized boolean, and if it's not initialized when we need to actually interact with Sikuli, we wait at that moment instead. But like you said, it won't change the fact that we're starting a process, which in turns starts a JVM, Jython parser, the Sikuli jar which then must be fully initialized... That's where you'll see real performance improvement, but that's not in C#.

Maybe there's a way to "precompile" or "preload" Java code, but I'm really not a Java expert (more like the other way around)

[christianrondeau]

Just FYI: https://answers.launchpad.net/sikuli/+question/168519 this is where you can make a difference.