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OpenOffice Bloated?
cygnusx writes "ZDNet's George Ou has been writing a series of posts about Open Office bloat. Includes some interesting system usage comparisons" From the article: "Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org."
I don't use Windows and haven't since '98. At one point, I ran Linux, but kept a dual boot system with Windows, just for opening complex Word documents. Then, I started using Crossover and that saved me a lot of time and I eventually wiped Windows off my box for good.
Now I got into OS X, and I run MS Office on it. I must say though, without bias, that MS Office has to be their greatest product. It just works and I haven't ever had any issues with it at all. It is fast, user friendly, stable and usable. Let's face it: when coders code a word processor they will always look at MS Office for implementation ideas. On the Powerbook, MS Office just flies.
A few weeks ago, I tried to run Openoffice on my Debian box, and there was a huge performance decrease, when compared to running MS Office. It was certainly noticeable. It took a while for a document to open up.
Though, Office has been around for a long time and Openoffice hasn't, so I'm sure there will be lots of features and performance gains in the coming years for the latter. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on Openoffice.
I'd chance my arm and say a fair bit.
I made the mistake of opting for x86-64 Gentoo for one of my desktop boxes ("upgrading" it to 32bit this weekend), meaning I have to use the 32bit precompiled OpenOffice binaries. But these need hooking into a 32bit JRE which x86-64 Gentoo doesn't have, since making 32bit apps available through Portage is seemingly something that Gentoo Won't Do Because You Should Be Happy With 64bit. So whenever you start OOo it spends about a minute looking for a JVM (and failing) before you can do anything. I could have manually installed Sun's 32bit JRE, but I can't be bothered.
Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.
By way of comparison, I tried the same trick on my 32bit box (similar spec but with slower HDD's) and OOo was as snappy as hell and opened like the proverbial soil off a shovel.
If there's any functionality I miss through disabling Java, I haven't encountered any yet. And please note I'm not saying that Java is slow to execute (it isn't), it's just appallingly slow to load.
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Well, according to the Misco catalogue I received this morning MS Office standard costs £300.
At my local computer shop, RAM costs £75/GB, so I could have 4GB of RAM for my machine.
On a price performance comparison MS Office uses 7MB and OO.org uses -3960MB.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
This would definitely be a factor if you were running it on, say, a 486. Try out the GIMP for Windows, there is no perceptible difference in GUI responsiveness, even though it uses GTK+ instead of the Windows API. I think the main problem with OpenOffice is that it's an ancient codebase and tries to do too much internally. Someone designing it today would probably use platform-specific features more actively instead of trying to make it look the same on every platform (which was the meaning of "portability" about 15 years ago). Not to mention, StarOffice was always a crappy, bloated product and OpenOffice isn't much better.
I don't like Microsoft. I don't like Windows. I do, however, like Office. It's been a good office suite for a very long time. It's been very easy to use since I first started playing with Office 4.2. If Microsoft would actually release a version of MS-Office for Linux then I would probably purchase it.
Before everyone starts ranting about how this isn't good for GPL, or how I'm being bad by saying this, remember, the point of the GNU OS is for application developers to have a level playing field. Microsoft, like any other consumer software maker would be just as correct to participte in that kind of market as anyone else.
I use Open Office, but I don't agree that it's the best productivity suite. It is the best free productivity suite for Linux at the moment. Since Microsoft's product will always cost money, Open Office undoubtedly will remain the best free productivity suite; it will serve as a baseline. If vendors wish to make a commercial product that is better than Open Office and charge for that product it's their right to do so.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm not sure how feasible it is to profile such a large program, but I'm sure Microsoft profiles the daylights out of their stuff. Do OOo developers profile things like the start-up time? After all, you can't start optimizing things unless you figure out exactly what is slowing it down. Is it the Java run-time engine? Is it because it needs to load a lot of libraries that MS Office does not need to (because of dynamic linking to Microsoft DLLs). Maybe when loading certain data sets, the program goes into a pathalogical state, creating hundreds of thousands of small objects? I don't know.
But things like analyzing profiling data and then optimizing are not fun to most people. Even more so if it means that an algorithm needs to be re-written. After all, if the "open file" operation needs a complete re-think + re-write, who's going to do it? It's not "fun". After all, the "open file" operation already exists. Generally, I think programmers like to build *new* things as opposed to fixing old things. And in this case, it's not even a matter of "fixing". It's a matter of rewriting. I presume that at Microsoft, if Word's "open file" operation (run with me on this for a minute) is uber-slow, then somebody is going to *have* to fix it, or not get a good performance review/etc. However, in the case of OOo if no one makes it faster, well, it does not negatively affect the person who wrote the slow version in the first place (not to discredit OOo authors or anything. They've done a phenomenal job given that they do this for fun and not profit).
Of course, there are an equal number of programmers who like to fix security holes and so forth, but patching a security hole is one thing, while re-writing major algorithms in a large program is another. There are of course some programmers who love optimizing code (Michael Abrash?). But I think they are far and few between. Very often, once something works, an attitude sets in that "It's working. Now don't break it". And optimization in it's early stages will often break things.