Comments on OpenOffice.org Ninja: Is OpenOffice.org getting faster?

Good Work! I have been a fan of OpenOffice even b...

2010-01-27T15:14:23.557-07:00

Good Work!

I have been a fan of OpenOffice even before it was OpenOffice, back in the days when it was Star Office. I think that everything about it is good, with the sole exception of speed. I would love to see it faster. I think that one of the things that needs to be done is an analysis of how people actually use the programme.

In my case, I tend not to use OO most of the times that I boot up my machine. However perhaps once a week I will run OO and have it open for perhaps 8 hours. On other occasions I may over the course of a few hours open 30 or 40 documents over a short space of time. Most of the times I use OO I don't need to use most of the features that are available - I cannot remember for instance an occasion when I have used mail-merge.

1) On those occasions when I am using OpenOffice for a long period over the course of a day a 30 second start-up time is no problem.

2) When I have to open lots of documents over the course of a day a 30 second start-up time is a problem.

3) On Windows there is a QuickStarter available. However this eats memory (90Mib) so I do not want this running for the 90% of the time that I don't use OO.

Everytime the I use OO I need basic editing abilities such as copying and pasting, and the ability to change fonts and font decorations such as bolding and underlining.

Often When I start OO I need tables, footnotes, spell checking in languages other than English.

Occasionally I need clipart.

Never have I used the Media Player or Mail Merge.

I think that what I would like is the ability to select what features are loaded at switch on time so that only the essential features are loaded into memory, and other features such as mail merge would be loaded just as needed.

Right, let's keep a comment fair, but this should ...

2010-01-21T10:02:59.879-07:00

Right, let's keep a comment fair, but this should be done in all directions. A program have to be developed, and as a part of this development process it has to be improved in respect to the number and usability of functions - correct.
BUT, although I'm a user of OO since the pre-2.0-time (as OO-dev, to be precise), I have to say: Many functions are available now, but the performance is horrible, not only bad - at least CALC. When I saw some comparisons to MS today (which I don't like, but it is a competitor, of course), I found, that the OO 'eats' at least 5 times more and usually 10 times more CPU power for equal tasks (!!!). Similar bad is the memory usage in such comparisons...

Ok, it might be freeware ... BUT tell me: What do you think, how successful would Firefox be with a comparable performance? It is also freeware, it's memory consumption also was not the best before 3.x (and this is a polite comment, as you might know) - but it's performance always was at least acceptable.

I would say: A program should be developed in ALL directions with equal effort. More functions AND ALSO more performance.
It might be funny to see an enormous increasing number of functions - but the fun dies very soon, if one needs a whole day to do common work, which can be done with other software in the time between get up and breakfast.

Be it freeware or not, a performance difference of 20 to 50% to payware is just acceptable, but NEVER 500-1000% (I can be a fan of OO, but this didn't make my day's last 120-240 hours... time is precious - for everyone)

Sorry Folks but Wirth's law is incomplete. A more ...

2009-04-19T20:02:00.000-06:00

Sorry Folks but Wirth's law is incomplete. A more truthful and accurate "Wirth's Law" is as follows:
"Microsoft and Openoffice.org Software, hereinafter referred to as M$-Bloatware and OOBloatware, respectively, gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".
Seriously though, it's pathetic to make excuses for badly designed and written code by hiding behind and accepting "Wirth's Law" as a fait-accompli. The fact is that OOo is SLOW and inefficient. Even a layman can reason that if a crappy bureaucratic company like Microsoft (aka Bloatwares-R-Us) can produce an office suite that is much faster than openoffice (with many more features the OOo), then how many excuses are the folks at SUN and OOo going to make before they face up to the fact that their suite is badly in need of a re-architecting? Thanks for your benchmarks, but please stop making excuses for Openoffice and the horrible stagnation that it seems to suffer from.

flyingreptile: Maybe I could run this for you. I ...

2009-03-22T07:59:00.000-06:00

flyingreptile: Maybe I could run this for you. I was already planning to benchmark Linux filesystems. What exactly would you compress? OpenOffice.org obviously reads its own files (/opt/openoffice.org3 or similar directory), but it also accesses files all over the disk including /etc, /usr, and /home.

Hi could you publish the code you used for the ben...

2009-03-14T08:57:00.000-06:00

Hi could you publish the code you used for the benchmark? I'd like to repeat this using squashfs (or reiserfs4) to see if compression could reduce the cold start times.

Yes, OOO is WAY better with big docs. My partner ...

2008-11-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, OOO is WAY better with big docs. My partner has suffered writing two genealogy docs-with-lots-of-pictures on MSO2003 and suffered crashes and losses often. The same docs loaded and were editable without issues (except for odd page-numberings across sections). OOO's ToC works, MSO's just crumbles...

Firs of all I would like to say that this is an ex...

2008-09-12T01:46:00.000-06:00

Firs of all I would like to say that this is an excellent article.
As another reader has said, the error bars on the graphs show a scientific approach that raises the credibility of the analysis.

A couple of points about performance comparisons between OOo and MSWord:

(disclaimer: my experience is MSO 2000 vs. OOo 2.0 - 2.2 - 2.4; the comparison in therefore not very fair (an 8-year old product vs. a 0-to-2 years old product), but hey, I don't buy MSO licences just to make performance comparisons)

The startup times of MS Word are shorter than those of OOo Writer; given that both products preload portions of the suite at logon time, I would say that in this area MS Word wins.

When dealing with large documents, i.e. 100+ pages with about 1 image (1-2MB) every other page, file size varying from 70 to 150MB, I have to say OOo wins hands down.
When Word has opened the document, it keeps the CPU a about 100% usage, even if the user doesn't touch the keyboard. Crashes are frequent. Saving is dog slow.
Woriking with a document of the same size and complexity, created from scratch with OOo Writer, is much easier: no crashes, faster saving, lower CPU utilization.

So in my experience OpenOffice Writer handles big documents better that MS Word.

Just my 2 (euro)cents.

I am used to using Microsoft Office 2007. I downlo...

2008-08-09T14:37:00.000-06:00

I am used to using Microsoft Office 2007. I downloaded the beta version of OOO 3 last night for windows, and the first thing I noticed was that it is SLOW!

It takes ages to startup, and ages to open and save documents, WHEN COMPARED TO MS OFFICE.

Also, another glaring issue is that the templates don't have a preview function on them.

If these guys want mainstream conversion to their app, they better get these basic issues sorted out.

Kami: Yes! In one of the next few.

2008-06-04T18:07:00.000-06:00

Kami: Yes! In one of the next few.

Can you compare with OxygenOffice Professional 2.4...

2008-06-04T12:19:00.000-06:00

Can you compare with OxygenOffice Professional 2.4 where we use some boost from go-oo builds.

I had no problems running OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 thr...

2008-06-02T00:06:00.000-06:00

I had no problems running OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 through 3.0 on Fedora 7. ...

I'm pleased to hear that. But OOo 1.0.1 was released in 2002, so it's not yet very old software... I recall having DLL trouble installing then-current OOo on a Windows 98 some years ago. Not sure if it was 98SE or the original one, and I don't have that system any more to check.

Anonymous: Rotting? I had no problems running Ope...

2008-06-01T07:10:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: Rotting? I had no problems running OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 through 3.0 on Fedora 7. OOo version 2.4.0 runs on Windows 98SE, while MSO 2003 requires Windows 2000.

From article: OpenOffice.org doesn't compel users ...

2008-06-01T06:19:00.000-06:00

From article: OpenOffice.org doesn't compel users to upgrade, so you are welcome to continue using older versions.

Nonsense. OpenOffice.org users are pretty much forced to occasionally upgrade for much the same reason users of proprietary office packages are. Support for old binaries on newer OS versions tends to "rot" (especially on Linux and its myriad libraries which does not care too much about 100% backward binary compatibility). File formats change: Most pre- 2.0 versions don't read ODT, and users also want to be able to use the added or improved support for proprietary formats in newer OOo versions. For example, until 2.3.1, OOo could not properly handle the MS docs based on the particular corporate Word template I often have to deal with.

On the plus side, I am mostly a happy OOo user. It does everything I want and in my opinion is easier to use than Word when you want a consistently formatted document. But the resource usage stinks, and does not really seem to get better, if not terribly worse.

Startup time and document open times are getting i...

2008-05-30T07:40:00.000-06:00

Startup time and document open times are getting into 'ok' category now, but I am very worried about scrolling and saving times. When working of large documents you scroll them and save them much more often than you open them, so any slowdown there is much more detrimental to work performance.

Anonymous: I plan to test ooo-build and Fedora's O...

2008-05-30T07:30:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: I plan to test ooo-build and Fedora's OpenOffice.org soon. By the way, Fedora does not use ooo-build.

Anonymous: I wrote Python software to perform the operations using PyUNO while taking measurements. Then, another Python program manages the first, performs reboots as necessary, and collects reformats the statistics. Finally, R (a statistical program) draws the charts.

Phil: Someone beat you to it. Please read "Responses to 'Is OpenOffice.org getting faster?'"

"It would be interesting to do the test with the o...

2008-05-30T06:01:00.000-06:00

"It would be interesting to do the test with the ooo-build patch set (http://www.go-oo.org), which is used by default by Novell/SUSE, Red Hat/Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, etc... They are claiming better performance than the standard Sun version."

I tried this version... it deos seem a bit snappier, but, it had MAJOR issues - formatting on NATIVE Openoffice documents was fubar'd... tab stops, etc, made perfect templates we've been using for years from version 1.x up to 2.4 broke badly.

I can't believe Novell released such a buggy version.

JHC! The past participle of "creep" is "crept".

2008-05-30T05:23:00.000-06:00

JHC! The past participle of "creep" is "crept".

Please redraw all your graphs starting the vertica...

2008-05-30T04:23:00.000-06:00

Please redraw all your graphs starting the vertical axis at zero.

And go and read Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" and desist from that evil practice which exaggerates differences.

Shame on you!

Hi, Fantastic study ... but I wonder how you mana...

2008-05-30T03:56:00.000-06:00

Hi,

Fantastic study ... but I wonder how you manage to automate the testing of a gui application like oo ... could you share a little bit about how you did that?

It would be interesting to do the test with the oo...

2008-05-30T01:16:00.000-06:00

It would be interesting to do the test with the ooo-build patch set (http://www.go-oo.org), which is used by default by Novell/SUSE, Red Hat/Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, etc... They are claiming better performance than the standard Sun version.

OO need to learn from Firefox and starts a Perform...

2008-05-30T00:23:00.000-06:00

OO need to learn from Firefox and starts a Performance release cycle sooner rather than later.

OO's speed and memory consumption situation can be improved as long as someone cares.

It's about to facing new generation of competition like the google office. If they don't have a great foundation to work on, they will be lagging at the end.

Luckily, after release 3.0, Firefox will be in a nice position when competing against safari and opera.

@Jason: Those aren't error bars, it's a box-and-wh...

2008-05-29T20:34:00.000-06:00

@Jason: Those aren't error bars, it's a box-and-whisker plot.

For the anonymous person complaining about Abiword...

2008-05-29T18:23:00.000-06:00

For the anonymous person complaining about Abiword ODF support: Abiword supports ODF just fine and the ODF filter should normally come with it by default. If you use a distro which doesn't package ODF support with AbiWord, send a bug report to your distro's maintainers.

There's plenty of good reasons why they don't adopt it as their native format. ODF is still largely just a dump of OO.o's internal model; Abi (like just about any other word processor) has different ways of doing many things. If we want to have something which can be the one and only universal default format, that means that all applications have to support all other applications' features. Neither OO.o nor ODF can support some of the things Abi and .abw can do (and the other way 'round).

It would be really great to conduct a similar benc...

2008-05-29T17:21:00.000-06:00

It would be really great to conduct a similar benchmark for Mozilla Firefox, from the Phoenix betas to the latest 3.0-rc. The native format (HTML) didn't change, which would the comparison more fair. The export could be replaced with printing to a file. Changing font size could be an interesting exercise.

I'm using OO on all of my computers (one win xp, a...

2008-05-29T14:17:00.000-06:00

I'm using OO on all of my computers (one win xp, all the rest - linux). It's more than fast enough. My perception based on many years previous experience with buggy ms products is that it is more stable and more capable. And it's free.

And it's free. And it runs on linux (which is also free and which comes with over ten thousand useful programs, unlike windows which comes with notepad and solitaire).