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Ubuntu vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark
ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."
Try disabling java in the settings. Made my version run a whole lot faster.
I wonder if the faster warmboot times under XP are due to its prefetching functionality. Another benchmark with prefetching disabled could determine this. Maybe Ubuntu or other distributions can try adding prefetch functionality to their distributions and put Windows where it belongs, (at) last.
On my Mac desktop I used OpenOffice for a long time. I find MS Office on the Mac to be a train wreck. But OO's performance really sucks on the Mac, even with Java turned off. I switched to Apple's own iWork '09 and it's fantastic, far superior to any alternative on the same OS. I prefer open document formats, but I need to get my job done.
My point is I hope the OO teams can focus more on performance across the board. I realize the difficulty when it's built for multiple platforms, but once performance is improved it'll be a much better contender.
Developers: We can use your help.
For others (like me) who are familiar with OOo but never heard of "Go-oo", Wikipedia says,
Go-oo is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons. Some of these changes or enhancements will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
It's a shame that even the Go-oo website does a poor job of explaining this on the front page (doesn't mention OpenOffice.org until nearly the very end) nor on the "about" page.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Oh wait. It was a rhetorical question. Sorry.
Deleted
(AC that got first post above here)
Already done. It's still slow. One other tip, as well as disabling the Java, is increase the amount of memory OpenOffice can use. That speeds things up, at the expense of RAM.
Having said that, OOo does what I need it to do, but subjectively it's still slow. Slow to start and slow when running. The widgets are particularly bad: flickering, slow to react, and never quite mapped to my theme correctly. Why-oh-why did the OpenOffice devs decide to create a whole new widget library? It's this sort of not-invented-here syndrome that causes OpenOffice to be bloated and slow. That and the weird idea to put the entire office suite into one, big executable.
OOo has plugins now. Maybe it would be an idea to strip-down the core office suite, by moving features not everyone needs into plugins. Then provide a dirt-simple interface for searching and installing new plugins. Not sure how this should be locked-down for big corps though.
No it isn't. It's written in C++. Look, you even contradict yourself with this quote:
Note that it doesn't say "The JRE is required for OpenOffice.org". You can install and run OO.o without installing Java, provided you don't want to use OO.o Base
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook...
XP...has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4 hour.
Isn't that 33% longer?
Why-oh-why did the OpenOffice devs decide to create a whole new widget library?
Portability. Remember that OpenOffice comes from StarOffice, which came from a company called Star Division (good band name, eh?). Star Division developed StarOffice back in the early nineties, before even Windows 95 was available... and they used their own C++ cross-platform library that was meant to make GUI development easier between Windows, OS2, Mac, and OSF/Motif.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Modern systems only load the memory pages of executables that are actually needed, so it doesn't matter how big the executable is -- what matters is how much of the executable actually needs to be loaded.
HAND.
That depends on how you define "longer":
1 - (3 / 4) -> 25% longer
4 / 3 - 1 -> 33% longer