What's the better user experience: Waiting once at startup for a long time or waiting frequently for a short time?

Posted by Roflcoptr on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Roflcoptr
Published on 2011-02-27T17:10:40Z Indexed on 2011/02/27 23:32 UTC
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I'm currently design an application that involves a lot of calculation. Now I have generally two possibilities which I have both tested:

1) During startup of the application I calculated only the most important values and these values that consume a lot of time. So the user has to wait approximately 15 seconds during startup. But on the other hand a lot of user interactions require recalculation so that the user often has to wait 2-3 seconds after clicking somewhere until the application has calculated and loaded all values

2) I load everything during startup. This takes from 90 to 120 seconds... This is quite a long time, but the big advantage is that all the user interactions are executed immediately.

So what would you generally consider the better approach? Loading all time-consuming operations during startup or when needed?

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