VMware ThinApp Blog: Performance considerations using AppLink

Do the Application Linking feature (AppLink) affect performance? Unfortunately the answer is, it depends.. Using AppLink will merge two or more Data Containers together. During this merge of the virtual environments, AppLink does its conflict resolution (learn more about conflict handling in AppLink here: http://bit.ly/1f11tKE) so yes, this will take some time to complete. Often this is not noticeable to the end-user though. One or two AppLinks are typically okay. Having 20 AppLink packages might be a little bit of a stretch. Then your end-users will start to notice a delay in start time. But..

..it depends on what you AppLink as well. One method I use to determine if an AppLink package will be fast to AppLink is to launch my parent package, with its AppLink and then investigate the Sandbox. When AppLink has been completed you’ll find a file called Merge.XXXX.tvr in the Sandbox. If this file is large, your AppLink operation will take time. The Merge-file will be created every time you launch the application. So if the Merge-file is 50MB, your users will write 50MB of data on each start of your Package.

Since we start Services if there is any in the AppLink packages, you can save start time by disabling Services. Most of the time you can safely disable Services from being auto started using below in your AppLink project’s package.ini:

[BuildOptions]
AutoStartServices=0

via VMware Blogs http://bit.ly/1o0hCYG