I noticed something weird when opening Joplin (on Windows) after it has been minimised.
If you start it from the tray icon, it opens instantaneously (just a few milliseconds). But when you start it by clicking on the icon (from the Start menu or from the Taskbar), it takes several seconds.
The outcome is the same in both cases: it opens the app window on the page where you left it when you minimised it, but the time difference is really huge (several orders of magnitude).
This is even more evident when running it on an old/slow machine.
This is likely because if you click on the shortcut, you don't just bring the minimised application to the front but rather try to launch the program from scratch. Joplin doesn't allow running multiple instances like that, so during the process it sees the already running instance, abandons opening a new instance, and then brings the already running one to the front. All of this requires processing power.
If you click on the minimised icon, you just bring the already running Joplin to the front, which doesn't require any processing power and thus is instant.
However, since it does not happen to any other app (with a tray icon) I use, I am wandering if:
there is anything that can be added to the app in order to "realize sooner" that there is another instance already running and avoid all those activities done at the beginning
we should probably move this discussion to the "Development" category
in the meantime (i.e., before the fix mentioned at the previous point gets implemented), is there a command line option, or any other solution, we can use to overcome this issue?
Are those other applications also based on Electron? When Joplin starts, it essentially launches a full-fledged Chromium browser window in the background, which can be slow depending on the hardware and/or software (e.g. antivirus, etc.).
Also, when it comes to the portable release specifically, it is slow to start because on each run the launcher unpacks Joplin to a temporary folder first, and this process is very CPU and I/O intensive. I've seen it take like 30s or so on an underpowered device.