[Wine] Keep wine resident

[Seth Hill]

Hello all, 

Is there a way to instruct wine to stick around after a program has run? Alternatively, is there a way to “boot” a wine prefix and keep it running? 

As part of a project to port some windows software to linux, I am using wine to run a windows-only command line utility in a loop. Running it via wine it works just fine, however, calling it in a loop is extremely slow. 

It seems that the wine “boots” when the program is called, then shuts down immediately after. This takes a few seconds every time the program is called. Unfortunately I need to call this program many thousands of times, so those extra seconds add up to hours. 

I’ve discovered that if I run a wine GUI application before running the program (such as winecfg, notepad, etc.) beforehand, the startup time is eliminated. That solution is a bit awkward, as this program is being run in a cluster computing environment (on dozens of headless nodes). 

The ideal solution would be a command line switch to wine or a service that could be run when the node boots. I did try wineserver -p, but that had no effect on startup time (I’m not sure what wine server does). 

Any thoughts? 


Thanks, 

Seth