Comments on OpenOffice.org Ninja: OpenOffice.org obeys Moore's Law?

justwally,Yes, this the first in a series of what ...

2008-06-04T17:59:00.000-06:00

justwally,

Yes, this the first in a series of what may be about 10 performance articles. I recently posted "Is OpenOffice.org Getting Faster." Feel free to ask any questions anytime.

Andrew

Andrew, I'm thinking that what I was missing is co...

2008-05-22T14:23:00.000-06:00

Andrew,

I'm thinking that what I was missing is contained/will be contained in additional blog entries here. It appears that this was the beginning of a series, and that is what left me scratching my head.

Am I reading that correctly?

Anonymous: I disagree. While there is room for i...

2008-05-21T10:01:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: I disagree. While there is room for improvement, OpenOffice.org overall has done a good job fighting bloat in terms of disk usage and speed.

The disk usage data is available here: Size of OpenOffice.org installed.

@andrew z@ - the point is that this is just "spin"...

2008-05-21T08:51:00.000-06:00

@andrew z@ - the point is that this is just "spin" -- reality: OO is getting bloated, spinster: "No, see my pretty data" Compare OO to kde, for example. Believe it or not, kde4 uses less memory than kde3.

Still, this an excellent article, can you post the data?

Anonymous: I sympathize with your concern: my comp...

2008-05-19T12:44:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: I sympathize with your concern: my computer at home several years old. However, today's OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 requires about 1% of an 40GB HDD. For a modern, major application, is 1% anything to be concerned about? I find that many users don't fill up their HDDs. Also, you are still free to use the older versions of OpenOffice.org.

You guys missed the point! Who cares if it uses le...

2008-05-19T12:21:00.000-06:00

You guys missed the point! Who cares if it uses less % of a 250 gb drive? This doesn't really help people who still use 40-80 gb drives. And I'm pretty sure that's still fairly high. (Take my job for example, we're locked in for another 2 years with celerons with 512mb, 80gb hardrives, and win XP.)

The hardware of the REGULAR user (ie., the majority of people) doesn't keep up with any of these laws.

This "research" is useless until it factors in the performance experience on a regular computer.

justwally: Maybe I misunderstood? Yes, OpenOffic...

2008-05-17T12:43:00.000-06:00

justwally: Maybe I misunderstood? Yes, OpenOffice.org Base did increase the size of OpenOffice.org going from 1.1.5 to 2.0.0. However, it's not feasible to measure the components of OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Base, etc.) independently because OpenOffice.org is more integrated than Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org has more common code, so it is not possible to claim that OpenOffice.org Base consumes X bytes for a comparison to Microsoft Access which consumes Y bytes.

Andrew, it appears I need to read your posting a f...

2008-05-17T12:38:00.000-06:00

Andrew, it appears I need to read your posting a few more times then. Somehow I am missing something. :-)

Anonymous: Please see the next article OpenOffice....

2008-05-17T10:21:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: Please see the next article OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office vs. Moore's Law for a comparison to Microsoft Office, and I uploaded the data tables and the chart you mentioned. There you can see the little details.

justwally: On Linux OOo 2.4.0, OpenOffice.org Base is just 8,930,631 bytes. Writer is even smaller. Most of the bulk is in core packages. All these packages (Base, Writer, Calc, Math, etc.) are included in all the charts in these two articles because they are installed by default.

Like the others, I'd like to see a comparison to M...

2008-05-16T18:36:00.000-06:00

Like the others, I'd like to see a comparison to MS Office.

However, what I think we're seeing is a fairly tightly written program that isn't expanding that much itself, but has a large expansion as extra fonts and filters are added to it, the little extras to allow people to easily import files from other sources. Every time MS change MS Office, a whole new set of filters need to be incorporated into OO so we can open the new MS documents.

I like the OO percentage graph, but would also like to see it on an actual MB growth chart to see how the size of the help and the program has grown in reality.

Something that is notably missing is any mention o...

2008-05-16T14:13:00.000-06:00

Something that is notably missing is any mention of the addition of little things...like OpenBase? Of course it makes OO grow.

When you talk to MS, they will tell you all about their MS Office "Family," which includes Access, Outlook, MS Publisher, Visio, and on and on...

Taking both points into consideration, I fail to see how the analysis serves as a realistic look at the situation.

Just some thoughts...

Anonymous: OpenOffice.org versions 2 and 3 will le...

2008-05-15T08:32:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: OpenOffice.org versions 2 and 3 will let you choose which modules (Writer, Calc, Base, etc.) to install, but the difference may not be as dramatic as you would think. Disk space is so cheap that few people care to bother slimming OpenOffice.org.

... but, with OOo 3, we can choose which programs ...

2008-05-15T08:16:00.000-06:00

... but, with OOo 3, we can choose which programs to install... or not? then, if i only write texts, i can install only 'write', thus occupying less space than in version 2.4... =]

OK, I posted a comparison against Microsoft Office...

2008-05-15T07:20:00.000-06:00

OK, I posted a comparison against Microsoft Office.

Anonymous: This series is less about disk space an...

2008-05-14T11:32:00.000-06:00

Anonymous: This series is less about disk space and more about speed and to some degree memory. For 2-3 months, I have been working on a system to gather and report this data, and I have an exciting article nearly ready.

How about comparing memory footprints? How about r...

2008-05-14T10:44:00.000-06:00

How about comparing memory footprints? How about repeating all the measurements after a feature-rich document is loaded?

If you're going to do MS Office, I'd suggest using...

2008-05-14T09:32:00.000-06:00

If you're going to do MS Office, I'd suggest using VMWare or some other virtualization program so you can revert back to a clean copy after installing each version, and you can just count the entire hard drive (excluding swap) usage before and after installation as the proper size.

Sander Marechal and anonymous: Good idea. I would ...

2008-05-13T16:24:00.000-06:00

Sander Marechal and anonymous: Good idea. I would like to include Microsoft Office. It is difficult because of the many editions (Basic, Standard, Home and Student, Professional, Professional Plus, etc.) and the fact old versions of MSO are hard to find. Also, I assume MSO is more likely to install itself into various directories (such as c:\windows\), so it is less clear how much it exactly consumes. I'll keep this in mind for later and see what I can find...

Yeah, I would like to see a comparison to MS offic...

2008-05-13T16:07:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I would like to see a comparison to MS office too.

Would you be able to compare this to MS-Office?

2008-05-13T15:25:00.000-06:00

Would you be able to compare this to MS-Office?