Can you let me know which protection options affect execution speed of my application?

Default protection options should not cause an impact in the execution of your application. If your application have a very big import table (this normally happens in applications with dozens of MBs) you might notice a delay before your application is launched. Notice that the Virtual Machine settings will affect the loader speed, so your application will take more or less time to boot up. All of this is related to speed in booting up.

When your application has taken control of the CPU, it should run almost as fast as the original one (with all defaults options enabled). If you are inserting protection macros (we strongly recommend the use of VM macros) in specific functions in your application, you might notice a performance decrease if the code inside the macro is called many times per second or you have tight loops inside the VM/CodeReplace macros. If you are carefully enough and put protection macros in non critical places in your application, your protected application will have an equivalent performance as the original one.