Why is OpenOffice slow?

Mon Jul 3 08:35:18 UTC 2006

>
> So yes, it could be Ubuntu-related.
>   
Not really I think that it is OO related. Open office has allot of 
people yelling at it to be more responsive. It is noticeably slow and a 
ram hog. It is particularly slow under Linux and allot of the speed 
enhancement tips for windows will not work for linux.
> For fairness, you could also compare between Open Office under the 
> latest Fedora or Gentoo. If OO is really slow under Ubuntu, unless 
> you're a programmer and can fix it, you can compare the time you loses 
> with its slowness against the time necessary for a Fedora install or a 
> Gentoo one (between half an hour to a few hours).
>   
It is slower in Fedora then Ubuntu. Much slower. The only distro that 
did make OO run faster is one called beatrix that compiled it for speed.
> There's advantages and drawbacks to each distribution. Apparently Ubuntu 
> maintainers don't really have the resources to fix the speed, nor do 
> they consider it as a priority (read everyone's comment on Firefox bug. 
> If you don't know who is a main developper, check their emails or hang 
> around ubuntu-devel for a while). That might mean they won't really have 
> time to answer to your post  :) 
>
>   
Lets hope the developers change their tune soon. Or better yet lets see 
if we can compile a better version ourselves. All in all Open office is 
too slow for a core application of ubuntu. This is a real concern.

If you want to make open office run faster you need to decrease system 
resources. All other ways are nothing but a placebo effect (except pre 
loading which does work well). Use Icewm or Xubuntu to achieve this and 
run BUM to get rid of allot of crap you don't need. Open office runs so 
slow because it basically is the one engine running each office 
Application. So you want to use a word processor you load your database, 
Spreadsheet, etc as well. Also another reason why Open office appears 
slower is that it loads documents in whole instead of MS stupidly 
loading each page for viewing.

All in all it is running better under windows due to Sun's optimization 
for that platform and the use of windows library's while linux library's 
are ignored. We got to get something better.

Colin

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Why is OpenOffice slow? (Arjun Shankar)
>    2. Re: RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs (Alexander Skwar)
>    3. Re: Permissions, Permissions, Permissions (Alexander Skwar)
>    4. Re: Permissions, Permissions, Permissions (Alexander Skwar)
>    5. Re: How to get KWorld TV Tuner working under Linux
>       (Santanu Chatterjee)
>    6. Re: Less surprised (JD)
>    7. Re: USB mouse not working upon bootup (HarveyB)
>    8. Re: Read-Only RAID-5 on DVD? :-) (Harijs Buss)
>    9. Re: Why is OpenOffice slow? (Lo?c Martin)
>   10. Perl Guru, please help with Britannica (JD)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 11:41:04 +0530
> From: "Arjun Shankar" <arjunsha at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Why is OpenOffice slow?
> To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Message-ID:
> 	<54cb1e2b0607022311t758be44dw95f42ff0866fcbec at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Russell Davie said:
>   
>> maybe prelinking the binaries would speed it up,
>> It shortened OO load from 17 seconds to 12seconds on a AMD 2800Sempron, 756Mb.
>>     
>
> I'll certainly try that out too... once I get back to college (where
> the internet is free ;)).
> Googling for "prelinking apt-get install prelink" reveals that it
> makes Ubuntu 'feel' faster. Interesting... I should learn more about
> this.
>
> But back to work for now, before I'm told off for misusing office
> resources. Thanks a lot for that tip!
>
> Arjun Shankar
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 08:15:54 +0200
> From: Alexander Skwar <listen at alexander.skwar.name>
> Subject: Re: RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs
> To: Ubuntu Help and User Discussions <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID: <44A8B61A.1060305 at mid.email-server.info>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
>   
>> Alexander Skwar <listen at alexander.skwar.name> writes:
>>
>>     
>>> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> There is an apparancy that quality is
>>>> higher with commercial
>>>>         
>>> There *is*? I disagree. There's just too much unstable pre-beta
>>> grade "stable" commercial software out there.
>>>       
>> It doesn't matter much to me which is of higher quality.  What makes
>> me hate commercial software so much is that I hate to pay a lot for
>> crap that works poorly.  While (most) free software also works poorly,
>> I can't really complain, having not paid much for it.
>>     
>
> Yes, you're right. That's, more or less, also my feeling. If I've got
> to pay for software, I expect it to work. Especially, if there's a
> free alternative available; in this case, I expect not much, just that
> the pay software works perfectly, has flawless & current documentation
> and, most importantly, offers something, free software doesn't offer.
> Nothing special. But pay software never meets these simple requirements.
>
> Prominent example: The Hummingbird software. Be it Exceed, which has found
> its master in Cygwin X. Or be it NFS Maestro, which has to compete with
> MS Services For Unix (which are a tad slower) or normal NFS servers on Unix.
>
> Alexander Skwar
>   

-- 
Colin McDermott
Reboot Computer Reuse centre
Ubuntu Lite
http://groups.google.com.au/group/ubuntu_lite