"Optimized for flash media" message on PortableApps entries

[webfork]

So some of the entries have a message about how the program is optimized for Flash media. This includes VLC Portable, LibreOffice, Firefox, Gnumeric, WinHTTrack, Spybot S&D, Chromium, Celestia, and Sunbird.

I'm partially at fault for this as I thought early in my work on the site that was something that PA brought to the table, but now I'm wondering if that's for only some or all of those entries.

Any idea?

[guinness]

If anything it's not optimised, because if an application is writing to the registry then PA extracts this and writes to a reg file on the flash drive, thus increasing the number of writes to the flash media.

[webfork]

If anything it's not optimised, because if an application is writing to the registry then PA extracts this and writes to a reg file on the flash drive, thus increasing the number of writes to the flash media.

Makes sense. I can see tweaks that might help reduce for example cache writes in Firefox for instance, but I'm not sure about the other programs.

[JohnTHaller]

What is changed varies based on the app. Many of the larger apps have their larger files UPX compressed so they take up less space and have fewer writes when upgrading/installing. We've been tweaking our settings a bit as of late based on the average speeds and sizes of flash drives and the slowness of some poor antivirus engines so only the larger files are compressed, resulting in overall faster performance for more users at a slight size increase on the drive. Apps like Firefox have the cache disabled by default since cache written to flash makes the app slower on many USB 2 drives.

As for registry being stored to the drive that guinness mentioned, it's written once on exit to save the app's settings. Without doing that, the app simply isn't portable as you'd lose your settings. And it writes to the drive no more often than an app that stored its settings in an INI (possibly less often as its only written once on exit as opposed to every settings changed... which also varies by app).

The whole 'optimized for flash media' is kind of a holdover from very early on and, while still true for many apps, isn't something we usually employ in our current descriptions.

[webfork]

The whole 'optimized for flash media' is kind of a holdover from very early on and, while still true for many apps, isn't something we usually employ in our current descriptions.

Very cool. Thanks for the detail there.