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."

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.)

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

I agree, with some qualifications.

Excel is a pretty solid program. What I don't like is how some people use it. Because Excel has some database-like features built in, it leads people to attempt to use it as if it were (and in place of) a real desktop database, leading to really ugly, bloated spreadsheets and finicky cross-sheet references that break at the drop of a hat and are a major pain to track down.

I work regularly with a gigantic spreadsheet like this which is used as an internal financial planning and forecasting tool. The reason I've heard for originally using Excel is that they wanted something that would make graphs. Beginning from that premise, they piled all the data into a spreadsheet, and added sheet after sheet of subtotals forms, reports by week and month, reports by person, etc. It's truly hideous. In order to add a new person, you have to (by hand) modify each of the sheets, update the subtotal lines, etc., while in a real database program this would be relatively simple, if it even required any additional effort at all.

Excel is a great spreadsheet program for doing spreadsheets. What it's NOT is a desktop database, and far too many people are laboring under the impression that it is.

If Microsoft would quit loading all the query and PivotTable type features into Excel and concentrate on being a better spreadsheet than it is already, I wouldn't have any complaints. Even so, I suppose I grudgingly have to say that Excel is probably the least-offensive MS program out there.

Excel is *not* excellent

Excel is a serious problem for people like me doing circulating load calculations in process engineering. See my papers here [agdconsulting.ca] and here [agdconsulting.ca]. It is OK for chequebooks, but don't expect to design a copper smelter using it (use an ancient ver of 1-2-3 instead).

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:

• Use backward chaining to iterate circular calculations
• Not invert singular matrices
• Put in a more robust statistics package, although this may be a sub-set of the matrix math problems.

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

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

I think he's referring more to Windows' trait of moving the data for the most commonly used programs to defragmented sectors on the outer edge of the hard disk platter. The quickstarter may pre-load parts into memory, but it doesn't improve disk performance.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

So a truer comparison would involve starting Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, watching how much this entire toolset takes up in memory, and then load the Excel and Calc files and see the difference.

Well... no.

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.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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!!!!

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

Well, don't believe it? Benchmark it yourself.

He provided the test data here [lanarchitect.net] and here [lanarchitect.net]

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

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.

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 .csv, .xls, .doc, and of course .odt and .ods files.

Re:"Essentially" the same data?

"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!

Another Blog, another Bias...

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

Missing the point.

This article is missing the point of OpenOffice. It doesn't take scientific results to find out OpenOffice is slower to open files than MS Office. Anyone using them will see the difference in a big way regardless what data they use. The fact that it's slow to open files and uses more memory is the primary issue with OpenOffice. The fact that MS Office can't retain compatibility accross versions is the main issue with MS Office. The point here is that OpenOffice is the first software in years that is on par with MS Office. They are both 'comparable'. People may argue on which one is actually better, but for the first time they are both pretty damn close in what they can or cannot do. Why is it important? Because on every single other aspect OpenOffice wins hands down. It's free, while MS Office costs hundreds. It's open source and totally customizable, while MS Office is closed. It's free of patent issues, while the state of Massachusetts found MS Office's proprietary format isn't. That's what counts. We finally have a real alternative, that is for ever free, and documents created by it will always be able to be read by any application implementing this open standard. So sure, shout out all day long that OpenOffice uses too much memory for your taste, but at the end of the day, it still wins.

Re:Missing the point.

Because on every single other aspect OpenOffice wins hands down. It's free, while MS Office costs hundreds. It's open source and totally customizable, while MS Office is closed. It's free of patent issues, while the state of Massachusetts found MS Office's proprietary format isn't. That's what counts.

No, it's not. Not in the marketplace. What counts is:

1) Can either application handle all your needs?
2) Which provides the best user experience?
3) Which has a lower TCO?

OO wins #3 hands down. It generally ties with MSO on #1, unless you really rely on spreadsheet macros (say, to handle timesheets). Memory uses & speed are definitely a penalty to OO in #2.

What matters in the market is how much emphasis each customer places on #1-#3. In general the markets don't care at all about patents and open source except as they affect issues #1-#3. You care a lot because it's a passionate issue for you, but it won't affect OO's acceptance in the market directly.

Actually.

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).

I would actually buy Office

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.

Who's bloated and where?

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?

Don't compare apples to oranges

Anyone running OpenOffice on a Mac want to add another data point where MS doesn't have code "hidden" in the OS?

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!

Testament to Open Source Software Developers

When attempting to replicate one of the biggest bloatware software packages out there, that they make a version even bigger and bloatier!

Re:Testament to Open Source Software Developers

I would like to take this opportunity to coin the term "bloat-compatible".

A quick check with Google shows only one hit, on a page full of Baynesian Babble.

Re:Testament to Open Source Software Developers

It would be interesting to know if someone has investigated using the symbol hiding capabilities in the newer versions of gcc to eliminate some of the shared object related bloat that most probably afflicts OpenOffice. When you use shared objects for everything every function name gets put in the dynamic symbol table by default. The only ones that actually need to be there are the ones called from the main program and other shared objects. All of the functions and global data that are only referenced by other code in the same shared object don't need to be in the dynamic symbol table or linked at run-time. Windows has used explicit exporting of symbols from the dawn of time, you can explicitly hide or export symbols in newer version of gcc, 3.4 in particular. I think KDE takes advantage of it on gcc 3.4 compiles.

You can look at the dynamic symbols that ARE loaded when the shared object loads with something like:

objdump -T /opt/OpenOffice.org/program/*.so

The bloat is especially accute in C++ code because the mangled function names can be quite long.

All those symbol names are loaded and scanned to do run-time link the shared objects, it causes slowness at startup which OpenOffice certainly has and you take a big memory hit for stuff that is not useful code.

Manually keeping track of which symbols need to be exported and which are not is a pain, and is a pain in Windows DLL's. You would almost be better off on something as big as OpenOffice to write scripts to process objdump output and figure out which symbols are actually be called outside the shared object and need to be in the dynamic symbol table.

On the other hand its kind of good discipline to create an a clean and disciplined API for each shared object which defines the public interface to the shared object. It helps improve modularity, reusability, testability and discipline in general and eliminate bloat when you realize that in fact nothing is actually calling dead code.

Consider the Source

Consider that Intel owns a big chunk of CNET and then you see a possible conflict of interest brewing over an article possibly designed to sink Open Office. Now consider the author, George Ou, who has also posted such titles as, Is the Honeymoon with Firefox Over? [zdnet.com]

Seeing a bit of a pattern forming.

Re:Consider the Source

Then there's the old standby, "there's no such thing as bad publicity."

I know a lot of people who'd prefer bloated, slow and free(as in beer) to less bloated, faster, but $379.95 at newegg.com. Many of those people don't even know there's an alternative to MS Office. I hope they read C/Net.

TW

Re:Consider the Source

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? :)

Re:Consider the Source

If only someone would bite the bullet and port OS X or Linux to an Intel platform maybe Intel wouldn't be spreading all this propaganda.

Re:Consider the Source

Indeed. Intel should be pushing OpenOffice, because nothing makes me aware of how much I need to upgrade my processor like starting OpenOffice.

Re:Consider the Source

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".

Re:Consider the Source

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...

This only holds true for vague, relative and subjective statements like the one in your example.

A better example would be if Linus Torvalds said "I ran a test that demonstrates Linux booting 25% faster than Windows on the same hardware," and Bill Gates responded with "My tests show that Windows boots 15% faster than Linux on the same hardware."

Yes, both speakers have motives that are worth questioning But the proper response is not to dismiss both claims because of the speakers' biases but rather to take a closer look at their methods and their results. If you find problems with their tests, then you can dismiss their results. If not, then you must accept the results and attempt to reconcile them with any conflicting data you have encountered.

It doesn't matter how reputable the source is. You should always check their research before you accept their claims as conclusive.

Re:Consider the Source

> It doesn't matter how reputable the source is. You should always check their research
> before you accept their claims as conclusive.

Not in the real world. In the real world there are various constraints, mainly time. There simply isn't enough time to track down and verify every statement everyone makes. Therefore it is very helpful to be able to cull out the known cranks, crackpots and axe grinders.

That said, Captain Obvious over at ZDNet isn't exactly leaking classified information when he says OO.o is a bloated C++ (and since C++ isn't bad enough, Sun is adding extra Java suckiness!) horror and slow as molasses in January. Being pro Open Source doesn't mean we have to pretend OO.o doesn't need some serious performance tuning. The miracle is they shipped the feature set in 2.0 at all, now they need to stop adding features for awhile and make them work right.

Note: GP is correct

"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 [wikipedia.org] 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:

Ad hominem circumstantial involves pointing out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Essentially, circumstantial ad hominem constitutes an attack on the bias of a person. The reason that this is fallacious is that it simply does not make one's opponent's arguments, from a logical point of view, any less credible to point out that one's opponent is disposed to argue that way.

But I'm not surprised that you're incorrect, since Anonymous Cowards usually are. ;-)

That is not ad hominem

Read this comment [slashdot.org] 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".

Why not just evaluate the issue technically?

... an article possibly designed to sink Open Office

Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But what I find odd is that a simple, easily-measureable property like speed is treated as a religious issue and/or examined for conflicts of interest at all. Why not just measure it in a series of comparative tests as scientifically as possible?

And then, if Open Office is found to be lacking in speed, fine, no problem! The result simply becomes very valuable input to OO's design and development team, and in all probability will get dealt with very seriously and rapidly and to the benefit of its users.

There really shouldn't be an issue of contention here, if we're truly techies.

GUI

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.

Re:GUI

Office uses zero MFC. Most of the older bits is Platform SDK C, and is a b*tch to maintain, and the newer parts are C++ *but not* MFC -- I understand the Office team has its own lightweight frameworks, similar to ATL.

Re:GUI

This would definitely be a factor if you were running it on, say, a 486. Try out the GIMP for Windows, there is no perceptible difference in GUI responsiveness, even though it uses GTK+ instead of the Windows API. I think the main problem with OpenOffice is that it's an ancient codebase and tries to do too much internally. Someone designing it today would probably use platform-specific features more actively instead of trying to make it look the same on every platform (which was the meaning of "portability" about 15 years ago). Not to mention, StarOffice was always a crappy, bloated product and OpenOffice isn't much better.

Re:GUI

IIRC there was an article not too long ago that explained that the main difference between Office and OO is that Office makes extensive use of lazy loading, while OO essentially hammers through loading every library it may need, which not only thrashes the disk once on initial load, but again as you (likely) swap out memory pages. My recollection was that this lack of lazy loading had something to do with cross-platform compiling and linking issues, as well as MS having extensive resources to put into optimizing Office loading that OO did not. My understanding is that Sun hasn't exactly dumped developer time into OO, either, and I believe the focus of this release was compatibility and.

Typically people solve this problem by preloading a bunch of the relevant libraries at startup, a strategy both MS and OO attempt to employ (viz OfficeStartup and OO QuickStarter). I used to detest that, but if I had 1 or 2GB or RAM and wanted to rely on OO, I might not find it so bad. I think an interesting addition to this comparison would be to see how OO fared with QuickStarter enabled, and what drain that placed on the rest of the system. Likewise disabling the JVM loading.

Re:GUI

I really can't say. Thing is, MS Office 2000 is snapier and loads faster (almost instantly) than OO 1.1.3 or OO 2.0 on my P II @ 333Mhz machine with 256 MB of RAM. Oh yeah, I run MS Office with Wine.

I'll bet

Excel also crashes faster than Calc! *ducks*

Perhaps the reason is...

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...)

Why they don't care

"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?"

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.

Re:Why they don't care

Here's why more people don't use OpenOffice: 1. THEY'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Most people don't know jack squat about computers or programs. They use what everyone else does or what they've seen elsewhere. That would be MS Office because that's what they have at school or work. They don't know that there are any other office suites even out there. 2. If they do know about OpenOffice, they don't like it because if they had ever used it before, the commands are in slightly different places on the menus than in the version of Office they use at work. This made it "too hard to use" because they have to re-learn a few locations of functions. (Interestingly enough, most people I know HATED Office 2003 when it first came out because the commands and menus were a little different than in Office 2000. They said it was impossible to use! Same thing for Windows 98 users than went to XP.) 3. They opened up the most heavily-formatted Office 2003 document they could find- lots of macros and such. It didn't open up quite right in OpenOffice, so they concluded that it was junk, never minding that Office 2000 or XP would have barfed on it worse. I used my Linux-running computer to display a read-only PPT 2003 presentation off of a USB stick after the presenter's computer crashed. He was SO pissed that one hyperlink didn't work right (linked to a non-existant file on the "E:/" drive, but the rest of the presentation was *perfect.*). So he used somebody else's computer with Office 2000. The text boxes were all over the place and his background was gone when they displayed it... 4. You can get MS Office for free from peer-to-peer or by sharing an original disc.

Too many eyes on the code?

Most of the bloat I see results from kludging together work from multiple sources that are not communicating well. Can't they solve this by switching to a faster parser? Or is the format itself flawed? So many questions, this doesn't bode well. Speaking of bloat, why do linux distros come on 5 CDs with multiple versions of every possible thing. Have options is nice, but the fragmentation is getting out of head.

shoe on other foot this time? weird.

It's interesting today to see the bloat and memory hog complaints leveled against the non-Microsoft product while showing MS' version as lean and mean.

I can't defend the numbers, they do look huge, but we're seeing about one or two articles a week in the trade rags about the latest memory, cpu, cache, etc. advances. Technological advances render all but the most dramatic processing demands almost moot.

In the numbers and benchmarks from this article, unfortunately, this is one of the more dramatic instances. I'm always willing to wait a little more for opening an application, or a file if other factors offset. In this case, free vs. whatever Office goes for now, typically is enough of an offset, but maybe not so for a large company where that extra "time" and computer resources add up big, and the pricing is likely to be more disounted for volume licensing.

Interesting numbers on the two different speeds on processing XML. Does anyone know or conjecture the difference in the true internal XML data for the comparison? I thought OpenOffice was the more pure in the sense that it is true human readable data in the XML while Microsoft's format is more of an envelope architecture for binary proprietary Office payloads. And, I wonder what the specifics in this test were around that.

Bottom line for me: I'm still going with OpenOffice, I've been a fan for years.

Re:shoe on other foot this time? weird.

I didn't realize how much I hated OpenOffice until I used Word for a while last night. OpenOffice takes about 20 seconds to start on my Linux machine. The latest version of word takes about 3, on a Windows computer with half the RAM and a slower CPU. I've not managed to crash Word in quite a while, while OpenOffice crashes reliably if you paste a figure from, say, Matlab and drag it the wrong way (I have about 20 of those Sun "thank you for your crash report" emails in my inbox right now). And god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do. As it is right now, I'd rather use Word under VMWare than a native version of OpenOffice. For now, my favorite by far is LaTeX -- even with its arcane syntax, it is a hell of a lot better than anything else out there.

Bloat? Don't talk to me about bloat...

1. vi is a bloated version of ex
2. EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping
3. Sometimes I just telnet to port 80 instead of using a browser

I have compiled OpenOffice from scratch... took a while!

Re:Bloat? Don't talk to me about bloat...

I have compiled OpenOffice from scratch... took a while!

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.

No Office Gripes

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.

Re:No Office Gripes

MS Office has to be their greatest product. It just works and I haven't ever had any issues with it

You must be a very basic user. I had plenty of users with MS Word or MS Excel files that couldn't be recovered — only option was opening an old copy, copying contents and pasting into a new document. Unless it's based on a good template, this entails lots of rework and grief. This simply doesn't happen with OpenOffice.org: the worst I've seen is needing change a troublesome font.

Re:No Office Gripes

I think what you want to say is that Office Suites suck [thejemreport.com] overall.

I agree with that, I use Latex (Tecnixcenter) to typeset documents, I use gnuplot or Graphcalc to create graphics and mysql with java for databases (I dont know any scripting language like python or tcl/tk... I will learn them one day...).

Basically, what does an Office suites provides:
- Writing (Tex... or Abiword if you like WYSIWYG)
- Statistical oriented Data management (you could use R)
- Database oriented data management (Use mysql, or any other DB management, even Access!!)
- Mail (I use only webmail [gmail] but feel free to use anything)

The fact that with the Writing subapp of these office suites you can do all 4 is incredibly bad.

I remember that, once, there was an opertaing system and a community whoes trend on applications was to write simple [wikipedia.org], stand alone [wikipedia.org], task oriented [wikipedia.org] applications whose results could be combined to make something big.

I am sure that is possible to do making use of Graphical User Interfaces!
And, I am also sure that if the approach to program was that, applications will tend to be a hell of more stable.

The only downside I see on that is that there should be a need of a lot of standarization in the different output/input formats. But I think this is not difficult now with XML.

Re:No Office Gripes

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.

That's not true at all. While OpenOffice is "only" maybe 5-6 years old now, it is built on top of the older StarOffice codebase, which has been in development since the mid-1980s. It's not like they started from scratch a few weeks ago...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice [wikipedia.org]

Call a Spade a Spade

Just go ahead and admit it, they both suck for different reasons. We need a third player.

Re:Call a Spade a Spade

Just go ahead and admit it, they both suck for different reasons. We need a third player.

Patience young padawan. So far the biggest problems with OO have been the lacking features compared to the M$ Office aswell as interoperability with the M$ Office. We're obviously getting somewhere now that people start benchmarking and complaining about memory usage. Seriously, five years ago no one would've even bothered to check memory usage when comparing those products, there wasn't much to compare.

For the record, I'm not saying OO ain't bloated, so it seems, and perhaps there's been too much pressure to reach interoperability and feature richness, but it's too early to condem it. Time will tell wether their internal design is good or not. Can it be made faster/leaner/meaner without too much sweat and tears...

FUD

This is total garbage. I have been using OO 2.0 at home since it was released and I have noticed no lag compared to Office which I have to use at work. I do not have quantitative numbers to present, but I can certainly attest anecdotally that this blogger is flat-out wrong. I notice no appreciable speed difference between the two suites while processing the same files. (The machines are roughly equivalent at home and office)

NeoOfficeJ

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.

No Methodology

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.

Re:No Methodology

I wouldn't say they're garbage just no methodology for pointing out the obvious. MS Office 2k spanks OO.org on Windows on every machine I've tried it on - on both speed and memory.

Besides which, if there are that many vairables to OO running "well" then at least you could say MS office is consistent.

It doesn't really matter to me since I'll be using OO anyway. Besides which now that the open source world (Koffice, etc) have also pleged to support the OASIS format, we should be able to pick and choose our word processors in a few years without worrying about compatability. Open office isn't our last hope, it's our foot in the door.

Re:No Methodology

Yeah, because, you know, nobody else has been complaining about how slow and bloated OO.o is, or how slow and bloated StarOffice was. OO.o is perfect. Everyone in the Linux community is just perfectly satisified with their choice of office software. I know I am.

Bought

He is already anti-Open Document http://government.zdnet.com/?p=1723 [zdnet.com] and heavly pro-Microsoft http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/ [zdnet.com] so this is not unexpected.

More info on the source....

Not to argue about whether or not OOo is more bloated than Office, but George Ou has always seemed to be ranting pro-MS and putting forth statements like this just to get the reaction.

Here's his webpage [lanarchitect.net]

And his other ZDNet entries [zdnet.com]

Also, you might want to check out the comments already posted to his review of OOo beta2 [zdnet.com]

Lets see...

... open office being slow:

Java, now I'm no language bigot, but Java is slower than C (but more portable without changes in code).
It's a replacement for the most bloated piece of windows software and has most of the same features.

I use OO presently, it's not a speed demon thats for sure. However, A) It's free, B) Keeps me from having to run a windows emulator for word docs and scuh. So it's a win win. The equation would be ... 500$ vs lackluster speed, good compatability, and 90% features of office.

Re:Lets see...

OO.o is written in C, not Java.

So true

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.

No kidding...

The Mac port of OpenOffice (NeoOfficeJ) is so bloated that by default it starts up in the background when you log in! That's a crappy solution because it sits there hogging swap space until you want it.

I can start Mac Pages, Inkscape, Keynote and even the Gimp before NeoOfficeJ is finished loading. Now that's slow.

Free RAM with open office

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.

OpenOffice.org is not written in Java

Just to attempt to forestall all the Java posts - Openoffice.org is written almost entirely in C++, not Java.

Abiword, Gnumeric, KOffice

I've tried to use Open Office on my machine at home (dual-P3 800 MHz, 1 Gb RAM) and have always gone back to KOffice. OO has always felt "bloated" to me. It takes much too long to start up, and everything seems to slow down a little on my machine.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Abiword and Gnumeric load very fast and seem to fly during use. KOffice is a touch slower than Abiword/Gnumeric but still light years ahead of Open Office. It also has a very snappy feel to it. Abiword works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Yes, I know, this doesn't address databases or presentation software.

IMHO, there should be no question mark, but more of an exclamation point.

  -Charles

The true test of Open Source

The responses on ./ and the response from the F/OSS people will demonstrate whether Open Source is superior to Microsoft (or any closed-source company). If people just justify the results and claim that OO is still better just because it's Open Source, then in reality Open Source will lose. I think this is a time for the community to notice the problem, admit the problem, and then try to fix it. If the problem can be solved to the point where load times/memory usage is on par with Microsoft, then the Open Source community will prove that it is competent and able to produce a superior (or even equal) product that has the other advantages (freedom, lack of restrictive licenses, etc) that Open Source brings to the table.

Or... people can just whine and show the world that they're a bunch of babies who accuse people of being shills and just ignore the problem.

I, for one, hope the former occurs. I'll admit I'm not a good enough programmer (yet) to do anything about the problem now, but I hope the Open Source programmers who are capable will tackle this problem and fix it w/o making petty excuses.

Re:The true test of Open Source

A few years back, there were some articles showing that Linux was significantly slower than Windows on 4-CPU systems. At first, there was some questioning of the results from the Open Source community. Once the results had been verified, the Linux kernel developers set about to remedy the situation. They were quite successful, and Linux has beaten Windows in every such test since.

must be on a windows box

if i remember correctly, after compiling oo2, it ran very well and fast. the precompiled bins were def slower. my guess is that these tests were run on a windows machine. so just switch to nix and compile, its that easy.

Disable Java option...

Go to the Options and uncheck the Java option (Use a java runtime environment). After this, OpenOffice.org start like a breeze...

Re:Disable Java option...

You need Java enabled to work with .odb files. Well at least any that use the built-in database which is written in Java:

hsqldb.org [hsqldb.org]

I'm not sure if JDBC drivers are used for all external dbs, but probably.

Appologists

There are a remarkable number of OO.o/FOSS appologists here. The answer to this surprising result seems clear to me:

Microsoft makes good software!

Okay, call me a troll, but I've tried a lot of free software over the years and I almost always find it lacking. Microsoft's stuff, on the other hand -- most particularly Office and Windows -- is remarkable when you consider how much they do and how efficiently.

One of the biggest areas in which FOSS is lacking is the boring optimization and debugging that's vital for world class software. The truth is that Microsoft is huge and has lots of money, so they can afford to spend time on that important finishing polish. There's an old saying in computer science: The first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.

No kidding?

Anyone who has run OO on Linux knows very well that it is bloated. Not only is it bloated, but it uses some homegrown toolkit for the GUI. I won't even use OO, personally. Normally I don't have a use for an office suite, but when I do I'd rather us MS Office, which isn't a problem because I now have a Mac sitting next to my Linux box. Of course, I have never paid for MS Office. Maybe if I had to pay for it I wouldn't use it.

I'm sorry, but OO is one of the worst examples of what open source is capable of.

-matthew

External XML

XML is a data interchange format. We've finally arrived at the era where apps can interchange data in XML without (necessarily) being trapped in a proprietary data format. But that doesn't make XML suitable for internal data representation. Apps should use internal data formats that support their native performance, and serialize data objects to XML for interchange, including storage. Using XML internally when performance thereby suffers is the bad kind of lazy, bad design that saves development time at the manifold expense of user time.

The one key difference

I don't want to be an apologist for OO but you can't deny the fact that MS has had about 10 years long to get MSO right than the OOo people have had to get OO right. Now that isn't to say that we should or will have to wait ten years till OO is as good as MSO is today but we should cut them a bit of slack if the software isn't a slick an lean as it could be. In a very short period of time the OOo team have gone from nothing to something that can rival MSO. Assuming the pace of development continues OO will, I feel, be as good as MSO in two years.

Re:The one key difference

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.

OO isn't the best office

OO is only better than MS because you don't have to pay for a bloated mess. The best office package I've used is Lotus Smart Suite. I'd be glad to pay a three digit sum for a cross-plattform version (Linux/OS X/Win) of that office package.

OO memory usage

OO is pretty usuable, as long as you have a very large amount of RAM. I upgraded my thinkpad from 256M to 1G and openoffice load times went way down ( probably ~5x under some circumstances).

I'm not at all familiar with the architecture of OO or what the developers priorities are, but it'd be nice if a bit more time was spent on performance. Firefox could also use work here also.

I'm sure that OO wants to concentrate on features and compatability. That's certainly a worthwhile goal, but perfect compatibility seems pretty much hopeless, and you can always think of more features to add.

Productive Time

Far less employee time is wasted waiting for Open Office to run than is wasted on Freecell

Has anyone profiled OOo

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.

No problem

"Wife! I NEED a new dual-processor multi-gigabyte machine. No, OF COURSE, it isn't just for games. How could you think even think that."

Nonetheless, I'm finding that I'm opening Abiword about 1/2 the time these days. I was a WordPerfect fanatic in the day but since Word set the standard for lowest common denominator for slapping simple text on the screen, I'm finding that Abiword fills those needs nicely a great deal of the time.

 

Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perfect

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.

Excel is a special case...

The Excel team at Microsoft have always been a bunch of hardcore performance-and-utility fanatics, and the quality of Excel reflects that. In my opinion it's the only component of Microsoft Office that's worth anything, and I dearly wish it was available as a separate program so fat incompetant slobs like Word could be left to scrounge for users on shareware sites.

To maintain performance and compatibility, they refused to get drawn into the COM morass for many years... they interoperated with but didn't depend on COM. At one point they were even using their own compiler. Setting OOO Calc up against Excel is like comparing a donkey to a thoroughbred, and never noticing that the rest of the horses in the stable with the thoroughbred are broken down old screws.

Par for the course? (even "right"?)

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.

AbiWord v2.4.1 vs Word 2003

I tried this recently, just to check on initial memory usage, and fired up Word 2003 and AbiWord v2.4.1, typed in a very small line of text into both (same text), and checked memory usage under Windows - and found AbiWord using slightly less than half the memory that Word 2003 was taking. I've not tried having AbiWord laod up any Word documents or anything like that, yet, but it's certainly worth checking into.

Maybe George Didn't Use Enough Test Files?

I'm sure that George did a full range of tests, of files from size ~10K up to the 100MB monster. I'm not sure why he didn't publish the results of the other files, but surely MS Office showed the same disproportional speed increase and lower memory use for all types of spreadsheets and word documents...?

I read the blog entry, and this looks like an attempt to report the worst case (corner case) benchmark, for whatever reasons George might find useful. A fuller set of tests and results might make his case that MSOffice is better a little more convincing.

Hard to be convincing about the usefulness of MSOffice over OpenOffice, if you're going to ignore the fact that MSOffice isn't available for some portion of the users, and choose to report a single data point as if it were conclusive.

Oh really?

Me here using OO.org for the best part of 3 years for my Open University assignments and have not noticed.

This is a non issue for anybody that looks at the cost of the alternative, not only in monetary terms, but also in terms to access to your own data.

I don't care if it takes a bit longer fo OO.org to do this or that task, at the end I have a document that I am pretty certain I will be able to open and manipulate in a few years time, and I will not have to pay anybody for such privilege if I don;t want to.

Keep putting your data in the hands of the beast, eventually you are going to be deprived of it and will be charged to access it when you more need it.

OpenOffice saved me MUCHO time today over Excel

I had a user with a corrupt Excel spreadsheet. She wanted me to dig up a tape backup from March to restore. Instead I opened it in OpenOffice, and saved it back to Excel format, and voila, it mirculously opened in Excel again. So, in this instance, at least, OOo was much faster. :)

Re:How much difference between Java and C++?

Openoffice.org is a C++ app. It uses java for some scripting, but everything else is C++.

Re:How much difference between Java and C++?

AFAIK, most of OO is NOT using Java - the only part of OO in Java is the database manager, and that's only for the JDBC connectivity.

Re:How much difference between Java and C++?

How much of this slowness is the application's fault vs. this being a giant Java app running in a JRE?

OpenOffice is *not* written in Java. It'd most likely work better if it were. ;-) It is written in C++. I wonder if there'd be much of a speedup compiling it with the Intel compiler....

It does have some Java functionality, which is why a JRE is required. IIRC, gcj is the JRE most often used, which might impact interpreted Java performance. Gcj has a slow interpreter, though I think the most recent version has an optional JITC.

Re:How much difference between Java and C++?

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.

Re:How much difference between Java and C++?

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.