USB Thumbdrive issue

[Tim Schmidt]

No problem...  If you don't mind a few questions:

Are you using OpenOffice in Windows?  I'm assuming Windows XP?  

Incidentally, OpenOffice seems to run faster under Windows than Linux
(in general)...  It would make sense as the binaries (ok, I'm guessing
based on .tar.bz2 size) are quite a bit (10Mb) smaller for Windows. 
That would tend towards better cache coherency and less memory usage. 
Also, if they're using MSVC to do the compiling on Windows it may
improve performance vs GCC.  All of that was pure speculation on my
part, but seems sensible enough.

--tim


On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:34:53 -0400, Kevin Mulligan
<kevin at teamindecisive.com> wrote:
>  Thanks for the reply!
>  
>  I am a definite newbie, so please forgive me for associating my problem
> with Ubuntu when it might be the kernel (or OOffice). I guess I was just
> confused because I don't get the slowdown in Windows. In all honesty I
> couldn't tell you if it was USB 1.x or 2.0. 
>  
>  --Kevin
> 
> 
>  
>  Tim Schmidt wrote: 
>  Well, OpenOffice (1.x) is slow at saving files. By slow I mean a minute
> plus for a large-ish file is not un-heard of. Also, if your USB pen drive is
> USB 1.x then it's max speed is likely ~700k/s (my USB2 external Hard drive @
> USB1.1 maxes out around 750k/s). At several hundred k/s speeds (Much slower
> than a hard drive) OpenOffice would be even slower to save. Meanwhile, while
> OpenOffice is consuming all the bandwidth to your USB drive, opening another
> window (trying to access the drive) would not get you very far. It's a
> bandwidth contention issue. Frankly, this is all kernel-level stuff. Gnome,
> OpenOffice, and Ubuntu have very little to do with it (well, OpenOffice 2.x
> is much faster at opening / saving files, but that doesn't fix the
> underlying issue). The kernel people would have to implement some sort of
> weird per-process i/o limit per drive and that would be horrible. How to
> determine the limit? What if there's only one process running? Will anyone
> put up with their drives feeling 'slower'? Frankly, I've observed similar
> phenomena in Windows (from 9x to XP) and BeOS. It's just a limitation of the
> hardware and how hard it is to share it fairly and efficiently. --tim On
> Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:07:49 -0400, Kevin Mulligan <kevin at teamindecisive.com>
> wrote: 
>  Last night I was working in Ubuntu (4.1) using OpenOffice's presentation
> program on a MS Office Powerpoint. As I went to save it, I ran into a very
> long (minute plus) wait as, I'm guessing, the file was written to the drive.
> It was very much like the program had frozen, so I went to another desktop
> panel (can't remember the correct name, sorry) and tried to access the drive
> from there (icon was on all the desktops). It opened the box, but acted like
> the other open connection to the drive -- a white box that was not
> responding. After a while, they both kicked in and I was able to continue.
> Is this a known/discussed problem, and what can I do? --Kevin --
> ubuntu-users mailing list ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
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