The Dodeca Accelerator Utility

The Dodeca Framework and Smart Client are shipped with a command line utility, Accelerator.exe, that dramatically reduces Dodeca’s startup time, as well as improving the overall responsiveness of its user interface. The Accelerator is packaged with every ClickOnce deployment of Dodeca and needs to be run one time per Dodeca version installed on the client machine. The Accelerator does not run as a service, but rather, performs a one-time series of environment-specific optimizations, which includes recompiling each Dodeca assembly specifically for the client machine. Our own internal benchmarks have consistently shown 50-75% decreases in application startup time, as well as 30-50% increases in UI operation performance.

As the Accelerator modifies the client machine beyond .NET Isolated Storage, it does require administrative privileges in order to run. To run the Accelerator on a development machine where you have administrative privileges, follow these steps:

  1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the \bin\Dodeca subdirectory of your Dodeca Framework installation.
  2. Type the following command and then press enter:

    Accelerator.exe -ign

Note

Depending on the processor speed/cores and the amount of RAM installed on your system, this process may take up to 20 minutes to complete. The relatively long completion time of this installation process is due to the fact that the Accelerator recompiles each Dodeca Assembly.

  1. Once the process is complete, restart Dodeca.

From this point forward, whenever you launch an instance of the Dodeca Smart Client, your system will preferentially use the natively-compiled assemblies generated by the Accelerator instead of the assemblies shipped with the Dodeca Framework. The Dodeca assemblies have also been installed into the system-wide .NET assembly library, allowing the .NET CLR to bypass hash verification of each assembly at startup. This improves startup time and reduces the amount of CPU the Dodeca Smart Client consumes at launch time.

To uninstall the recompiled assemblies and reverse the system changes made by the Accelerator on a development machine where you have administrative privileges, follow these steps:

  1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the \bin\Dodeca subdirectory of your Dodeca Framework installation.
  2. Type the following command and then press enter:

    Accelerator.exe -ugn

Note

This command will uninstall only the assemblies of the current Dodeca version. To uninstall all Dodeca assemblies previously installed by the Accelerator, regardless of version, use the command line argument '-ucgn'.

For additional information about the Dodeca Accelerator, as well as some common installation strategies for production environments, refer to the section of the Dodeca Administrator’s Guide titled "The Dodeca Accelerator Utility".