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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."
When attempting to replicate one of the biggest bloatware software packages out there, that they make a version even bigger and bloatier!
Thalasar
Could it be the GUI? Excel uses native widgets and I'm sure is heavily optimized towards MFC (after all, its their API!). I don't think OO has that luxury. I doubt thats the entire issue but it could partially explain it.
Perhaps the reason that OO uses more private memory than does MS Office is that MS Office links to all the MS dll files, while OO bundles its own internal libraries with it?
And from article/blog/whatever: "Now to be fair, OpenOffice.org is free and is cross platform, but does this really matter to the 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows?"
If it's legally free to use and does the same task, why wouldn't 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows *not* care? People always look for what's cheaper, sometimes even if it's not better (note how MS became the company it is today...)
I dont know how you got the opposite results.
I installed OO 2.0 on my machine to check the updates, and to see if its speed is up to snuff. Issues with compatibility are gone but it is more than twice as slow while opening files. (I'm not using quickstarters for OO or MSO).
Heck since I'm reporting these results, I MUST be a microsoft shill too I guess.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I'm not sure I can see the conflict of interest here. Does Intel have an office suite of their own they're trying to sell? Or did they merge with Microsoft recently? :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
My company uses OpenOffice on literally hundreds of PCs. I use OpenOffice exclusively, save for the rare time we in IT use MSFT Office to open up a document for a user. (No, OpenOffice is not perfect at converting but that's OK with us).
OpenOffice is free (as in beer) and easy to use. The drawback? It's so friggin SLOW, SLOW, SLOW.
Real world use, real world PCs, real world users. OpenOffice is painfully slow. I have tested OpenOffice on dozens of PCs, users and my own, PCs and notebooks. Slow is as slow does, and OpenOffice does it slowly.
Kill the QuickStart process THEN try to open OpenOffice. UUGH! SLOW!!!!
Openoffice.org is a C++ app. It uses java for some scripting, but everything else is C++.
- vi is a bloated version of ex
- EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping
- Sometimes I just telnet to port 80 instead of using a browser
I have compiled OpenOffice from scratch... took a while!Hmm, you didn't provide any hardware/software specs OR timing/memory data (so others could confirm your work), but your results are nonetheless "informative". It must be because your results were in OO's favor.
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.
He provided the test data here and here
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Just go ahead and admit it, they both suck for different reasons. We need a third player.
I recently purchased an iBook G4 which came with a trial edition of Office.Mac (or whatever it's called). I used it for the 45 days of the trial and then switched to "OpenOffice.org for the Mac," otherwise known as NeoOfficeJ. The only thing I've noticed thusfar is that Neo takes about 1.5 times longer to run initially, and it seems to take longer to save files. Other than that I really haven't noticed any other differences in performance.
Hmm. I've been running MS Office 2003 for over a year and have yet to experience a single crash with Word or Excel. I've had Outlook freeze up numerous times, but virtually all of those problems have their roots in our Exchange server (and the seriously mismanaged overload they've piled on it.)
John
These articles are complete garbage. No mention of methodology is made. What files were loaded, what conditions were they loaded under. Was it the same machine, or a very similar machine. What distro, what JVM, and on, and on, and on. Sounds like another MS shill to me.
He is already anti-Open Document http://government.zdnet.com/?p=1723 and heavly pro-Microsoft http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/ so this is not unexpected.
Indeed. Intel should be pushing OpenOffice, because nothing makes me aware of how much I need to upgrade my processor like starting OpenOffice.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Honestly, I want to love Openoffice and to advocate it... I have worked in finance on excel, dealing with huge huge spreadsheets and many graphs... Have you tried to plot a 10 000 points graph in OOo Calc vs excel... in excel it is done in less than a second... In OOo the application will freeze for half and hour before slowly starting to display the graph. Cherry on the cake it will conviniently try to write "ROW" under each point in a huge ugly font. After that, changing the data means of course waiting half an hour again because the chart is updating. OOo calc simply doesn't do the job, how hard I wish it would.
\u262D = \u5350
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)
Just to attempt to forestall all the Java posts - Openoffice.org is written almost entirely in C++, not Java.
What about the source? Ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy. Who wrote the article should not have bearing on judging the validity of the article.
You clearly don't know what an ad hominem attack is. The ad hominem fallacy is where you say "Ou is an idiot, and I have reason to believe he's also homosexual. Therefore his article is rubbish". That is indeed a logical fallacy and an invalid argument.
On the other hand, to say "Ou has a well-documented history of writing negative articles on the subject of open-source software" is to state a fact, not to make an attack; and to continue, "therefore it is likely that his approach to the subject will be biased, his evidence selective, and his conclusions unreliable", is perfectly reasonable.
To be perfectly blunt, the provenance of an article is significant. If Linus Torvalds says "Linux is better than Windows", that means very little: of course he thinks that, and nobody really thinks twice when he says so. But if Bill Gates were to say the same thing, then it would be an incredibly significant statement, and people hearing it would immediately put great trust in those words: if Bill Gates says the competition is better, it must be really good!
Similarly, if an OpenOffice.org developer were to announce that their software was, in fact, not as good as MS Office, then that would be a significant announcement that should be given much credence. But when Ou, who has a long and easily verifiable history of writing articles that disparage open-source software, says the same thing, his words should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
That's not an ad-hominem fallacy. It's called "critical thinking".
Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.
Somewhat off topic but pertinent ENOUGH... Good God man! Thank you! The Java tab in the options dialog was incredibly easy to find but for some reason I just breezed right over it. Unclicking that little devil's box just dropped my start time from 15-20 seconds to 1. I know it likely has nothing to do with the working data that this "benchmark" tested, but it sure shows how good an idea it would be to transition the Java dependency on over to native code.
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
Just because the design of OO.o is completely braindead, that's no reason to handicap the competition to make it look better. If Excel is smaller than Calc, say so. If Word is smaller than Writer, say so. If Word+Excel+Powerpoint combined are about the same as the OO equivalents combined, then say that, but most of the time people want just Word, or just Excel, or just Powerpoint.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Go to the Options and uncheck the Java option (Use a java runtime environment). After this, OpenOffice.org start like a breeze...
1. It is not fair to compare based on file size. Not only are OOo files compressed, but different data that is the same size uncompressed can have drastically different processing times. Think of the difference of one page full of vector graphics, tables and a little text compared with 3 or 4 pages of text.
.csv, .xls, .doc, and of course .odt and .ods files.
2. It is a known problem that OOo takes a while to start. Staroffice (at the point when Sun bought it) was made by a German company. Most of the internal functions are named in german, and use abbreviations that are not obvious. The fact is that each version of OOo has been getting smaller and faster. OOo 2.0 is the same. If you run OOo 1.1.4 and OOo 2.0 side by side on windows, the 2.0 version uses about 10MB less memory when both have nothing open.
3. Since it uses more memory, it has a higher chance of being swapped out when you switch to another program for a while. A good way to see this in a short period of time is to run a torrent in the background (seeding or just downloading). Leave an OOo window open and use another program for 20 or more minutes. When you switch back to OOo it can take 10-40 seconds (depending mostly on the speed of your hard drive and amount of memory available) for the window to redraw.
If you are using OOo often enough to keep it in memory it is very snappy. But if it gets swapped out, then you will notice a speed degredation.
4. In my experience with small files (less than 200 records in a spreadsheet and 1 - 4 page documents) OOo takes longer to open and save files. I usually work with
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
As far as I can tell...
1) OOO IS slow - under Windows and Linux, enough so that competing "offices" like KOffice are kept alive despite reduced feature sets.
2) Office runs faster, but for that matter, so does IE - is it any suprise that MS can write software for its own OS which takes every possible advantage of its native environment to run with speed?
3) I use OOO whenever I can, because open standards means I know I'll be able to access my data in 10 years, unlike the struggle I've had with old Office/Wordperfect/XyWrite documents I've had to try to convert.
4) OOO is "bloated" in the same way my big multitool is bloated - you can't be small, fast, and everything to everyone on every OS
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Read this comment for a nice description of why that is not ad hominem.
Your slur on his 2 digit ID, however, is completely off topic. Google for "petard, hoist upon".
Infuriate left and right
One common cause for this discrepency is that Windows does pre-caching and pre-binding for commonly used applications. When you first install Firefox or OO, it will be slower, but if you don't use IE or Office for 6 months, while you use the alternatives regularly, the Microsoft apps will be slower after a while. IE takes *forever* to load on my laptop on the rare (once or twice a year) occasions I fire it up.
Is it time yet to admit that Excel is an excellent piece of software? It has managed to stay true to its core competencies (calculations) while gaining many new audiences. I have used it in the past year for stock analysis, dynamic web queries (a simple Crystal Reports), and site wireframing. While many look at the insecurity of macros, they are enormously useful for the financial community and advanced data analysis.
The great thing about open source though, I bet there is someone *right now* using the test files provided by this author to improve the Open Office parsing routines. Gotta love it.
I realise you're trying to make a statement with all your telnet to port 80 instead of using a browser and such, but I think you should at least have used a compiler to build OpenOffice.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
This is one area where Open Source has its weakness.
Cutting down and optimizing existing code is not nearly as glorious as adding new features.
Micro$oft, on the other hand, can afford to have a whole team of programmers who's only job is to optimize and slim down the code.
As much as I hate MS, they did get a lot of things right in Office (except for that damn paperclip).
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Because they don't care about "legal". Often when I tell someone about OpenOffice, they tell me it's neat but they already have MS Office at home - or at least word. If you tell them "but it's free", they often say they got the MS products free too - illegal of course. They figure why get some free knockoff when they can get "the real thing" free. The ones who paid for MS often got a student price or something, and they really have no incentive to switch until their existing version won't work any more.
The problem is that everyone has Word or Office already weather they paid for it or not. In that context, OOo has nothing to offer - the other benefits are too abstract for joe sixpack. It's a case where MS benefits from casual copies floating around.
The situation is the same for others: Mechanical Engineers tend to have a pinched copy of Autocad at home. Artists have a pinched Photoshop. Animators have a pinched copy of Maya. This hurts adoption of GIMP and Blender - sorry, there is no great GPLed CAD program (except for QCAD for 2D). I'm sure there are plenty more examples. If Longhorn can prevent people running illegal copies of all this software, we'll start to see people switch - assuming MS will allow them to run the legally free stuff.
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.
I was wondering how much of the RAM footprint difference was due to Office relying on Windows code. So just for the fun of it I fired up Excel on my Mac. 22.94 MB of real memory being used for Excel, 34.14 for Word. Compare that with 7.10 and 9.81 for Excel and Word on Windows and 37.54 and 37.66 for Calc and Write on Windows. Anyone running OpenOffice on a Mac want to add another data point where MS doesn't have code "hidden" in the OS?
"You clearly don't know what an ad hominem attack is."
The GP does indeed appear to understand the subject. I think the confusion lies in the fact that there are various types of ad hominem attacks. In this case, this is what's known as a circumstantial ad hominem.
The wikipedia article explains this well. If you believe the wikipedia article to be incorrect, you may want to take the time to edit it.
"But when Ou, who has a long and easily verifiable history of writing articles that disparage open-source software, says the same thing, his words should be taken with a generous pinch of salt."
Ironically, you have made an ad hominem attack yourself. From the wikipedia article:
But I'm not surprised that you're incorrect, since Anonymous Cowards usually are. ;-)
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I'll begin by saying that I mostly use Linux, and I use OpenOffice even on Windows when I can help it. One reason is that I don't want to give money to Microsoft, but there are other reasons as well, including my belief that Free Software is the key to the advancement of IT in the future.
But this situation is pure hillarity. OSS fans have their list of reasons why Linux (or some Linux app) is better than Windows (or some Windows app). Two reasons near the top are that Windows is slower and more bloated. These reasons are sited often and are part of the OSS mantra.
So I find it incredibly ironic that now that the shoe is on the other foot, the tables are turned, etc., that these very same people are dismissing "bloated" and "slow" as unimportant.
No, you idiots. "Bloated" and "slow" are ALWAYS bad, even when they apply to an OSS application. That means there's something wrong with OpenOffice.org, and if you have half a brain in your head, you have to accept that it's broken for that reason. That doesn't mean you should stop using it or feel disillusioned. And defending your beliefs in the face of this embarrassment just makes you look stupid and inconsistent. HAVE SOME FREAKING STANDARDS, and have them ALL THE TIME, not just when they make your favorite thing look better. It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
"It is a known problem that OOo takes a while to start. Staroffice (at the point when Sun bought it) was made by a German company. Most of the internal functions are named in german, and use abbreviations that are not obvious."
While I understand that you were not trying to be an open source apologist, this statement is the epitomy of the frustration that many mainstream users have with open source:
Office worker: "why does Open Office take so long to load?"
IT guy: "That's because the routines were written by a German guy in his free time. I'm sorry, little-miss-everybody-should-speak-English, but this poor guy was working for free. What do you expect?"
Office worker: "what does the German language have to do with this?"
IT guy: "Your PC was built in Austin, Texas. German is its second language. See this routine here, öffnenSiediegroßeAkte()? Your American PC doesn't know what that means, and has to consult a dictionary each time it sees it. There's a group of teenagers translating it into English. They work on one word each for greater safety. One of them saw two words of the program and spent several weeks in the hospital."
Office worker: "So, what do I do about it?"
IT guy: "Have a little more tolerance for the global community in which we live, and worship the holy light of open source that's shining out of Richard Stallman's ass. Oh, and consider dying your hair blond, adopting a schnauzer, and carrying a riding crop. Open Office seems to like that."
Office worker: "Dork."
If this continues, I think it will inevetably lead to new ad campaigns like:
Microsoft Office: We won't coerce you into adopting a schnauzer!
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
To what extent is this just the proper natural evolution of a large scale application?
Step 1: Functional demo, very lacking in features and stability. This would be StarOffice up through the 5.x series, and the OpenOffice 0.x series.
Step 2: Dramatic increases in stability and completion of all the major technical functions, but with a somewhat clunky or non-intuitive interface. OpenOffice 1.x.
Step 3: More user friendly and natural interface, but performance is not yet up to par.
Step 4: Performance optimization.
Each step is the natural evolution from the prior state. The initial state is an idea, which leads to a functional demo. The functional demo gets poked at by a few outsiders who say, "This might be a good idea, but it doesn't support features X, Y, and Z, and it crashes all the time." That feedback leads to the incorporation of new features and advances in stability. Then a larger group of outsiders uses it and says, "Yeah, this is getting good - it does everything I need it to, but the interface is a little goofy, so I'm sticking with my current solution for now." That feedback leads to user interface improvements. Those improvements lead to a much larger group using the software, and more people using the software full-time, those people say, "Wow, this is really well done, but look at how much (CPU|RAM|disk space|bandwidth) it uses." Which should, inevitably, lead to performance optimization.
That sounds like the natural sequence to me. In fact, that whole process - release, listen, refactor, wait till the end to performance optimize - has always been a big part of successful projects and is now becoming a big part of standardized software development models like those that come under the Agile umbrella. It would be worse if there had been a lot of unnecessary performance optimization that had lead to an unmaintainable code base.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
You can't deny the fact that MS has had about 10 years long[er] to get MSO right than the OOo people have had to get OO right.
Are you joking? StarDivision was founded in 1986, and some code found in OOo goes back almost that long. StarOffice was created in 1994. Depending on how you count, I would say that StarOffice and OpenOffice are within a year or two of each other in age.
Two years until OOo is as good as MSO? You're dreaming! I'll take that bet.
Personally, I use Gnumeric for all my spreadsheet tasks, and I eagerly await the day when Abiword doesn't randomly crash when a document contains footnotes.
Hidden code, you say? Before you go off accusing Microsoft of a Consent Degree violation, perhaps you should be a bit more careful about what exactly you're comparing. It is extremely important when you try to compare "memory usage" on different Operating Systems that you are actually comparing apples to apples. And since you didn't cite the source for your "7.10" and "9.81" numbers above, I doubt you really understand what you're measuring.
If you're using Task Manager, for example, you will by default only see "Mem Usage" which reports the physical memory (i.e., the "working set") consumed by the process. Even though this metric includes both private and shared pages (i.e., shared code and data segments of DLLs are charged to each process here), it does NOT include pages which still reside on disk (either in the executable images, memory-mapped files, or the system pagefile.
Another common memory statistic from Task Manager is "VM Size" (you have to add it to your column view by "View->Select Columns"). "VM Size" tallies private virtual bytes consumed by the process. Private means that this quantity does NOT include shared/shareable pages like DLLs and memory-mapped files. "VM Size" is sometimes smaller than the "Mem Usage" precisely because shared pages aren't counted. This causes a large amount of consternation to those who don't understand what is being reported, because they expect physical memory usage to be smaller. "VM Size" is the equivalent of the process's page file allocation, since shared pages by their nature are already backed up on disk elsewhere.
Another common memory usage metric in Windows can be obtained from Perfmon (perfmon.msc, the Performance MMC snap-in). From this tool, you can view "Virtual Bytes" of each process, which is the amount of reserved virtual memory for the entire process, including shared pages. It is equivalent to "VM Size" from task manager PLUS shared virtual memory.
So, as you can see, it is not altogether obvious what is being reported unless you really understand the details of memory management on the underlying OS. Before comapring application memory usage across platforms, you need to be sure you're using comparable metrics!
To be blunt, the guys who wrote the Excel GUI got an "A" in computer science, but the guys who built the calculation engine only got a "C+". To be a truely great spreadsheet, Excel must:
Any engineer who gives me a calculation done in Excel using circular reference calculations had better be prepared to get his butt roasted. I've had 10Mb files modelling a copper smelter that converged to a wrong answer - that's unacceptable given that the same calculation saved as a 1-2-3 file converged to a correct answer in 10 seconds using Lotus 1-2-3.
-AD