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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."
How much of this slowness is the application's fault vs. this being a giant Java app running in a JRE? AFAIK, MS Office 2003 is still a suite of (mostly) C++ applications, and isn't running in .NET yet.
John
Microsoft Office: $10 per 1 second less load-time
I miss you, where are you?
You neglect to mention that the comparison was a test devised by Microsoft, and involved importing a Microsoft-format file written by Microsoft about another Microsoft spec into a number of word processors. And appears on the homepage of a Microsoft employee. I think this may have some bearing on the result.
:)
Oh, and the bug the test complains about doesn't appear on my copy of Abiword either, but I'm using a later version of Abiword on Linux. Perhaps it's just Windows at fault
I don't know whether YOU are a Microsoft employee, Mr Anonymous Coward, and I never said you were. You did link to the homepage of someone claiming to be a Microsoft employee called Johnny Lee. See http://www.geocities.com/typopl if you don't believe me. Maybe he isn't a Microsoft employee,but anyone who'd fraudulently claim to be one is even less trustworthy on this subject, methinks.
"But that doesn't explain why AbiWord is still at least 3x slower than MSWord or OOWriter for this given test."
My point is that the given test could not be more Microsoft-centric if it tried. I don't dispute the results of the test itself.
"I fixed a perf bug in AbiWord. Would a Microsoft employee do that?"
So what? Raymond Chen contributes to the Linux kernel, and works for Microsoft. Go figure.
"I do not work for Microsoft Corp now"
Right. that makes ALL the difference. I bet you've still got teh M$ cooties though.
"Your problem is that you don't like the data, so you try and discredit the source for the data."
Oh, I don't much care about the data one way or another. Maybe abiword IS bloated and slow, I care little since I don't use word processors much.
There does seem to be a lot of astroturfing about these days, so when I see something that looks like it, I investigate, because that sort of thing interests me. After all, I looked at your homepage, and see 'Microsoft Corporation' right there under your bleeding name n'all, and that's all hardly apparent from the link you pointed us at - what's a guy to think?
"You said that because of these Microsoft-related points - "...this may have some bearing on the result.""
Bah, picky picky picky. This is fucking Slashdot so you can excuse me if I'm not up to professional standards of lexical rigour, and maybe I phrased it without the level of precision required to pass an academic fucking peer review. And maybe this test was useful for solving Abiword performance bug 51421.44.X Plural Sector 12 alpha subsection 4, I know not. But that doesn't mean it's appropriate to use this small, narrow, and very Microsoft-centric test to make a general statement on the relative merits of Abiword versus OO.o verus MS Office, as you tried to do. What's next in this idiom? Linux sucks because it can't run Halo 2 very well?
"Other people can corroborate the data."
Perhaps the test is reproducible, I know not. My attempt to reproduce it failed, but I used a different platform, so I didn't dispute the results of the test. I'm certainly not calling you a liar and it's not me that called you an astroturfer. But from some angles, you certainly look a bit like one, you have to admit.
"Raymond Chen used to contribute to Linux, way back. I sincerely doubt he does that anymore."
His email address in the Linux CREDITS file ends in microsoft.com, so I was guessing that maybe he's added to the kernel since he joined them.