Shadow Labs's Journal: OpenOffice.org - Fixing Slow Startup Time

I often times hear people complaining about the slow startup times of OpenOffice.org (the program, not the website), but I seldom hear any solutions to the problem. So I, Roturgo, take it upon myself in this week's Shadow Labs Journal to enlighten the masses.

Of the OpenOffice users that I've encountered, very few have realized the plethora of customization options that exist in Open Office. I won't go into great detail about most of them, but I will discuss one very useful option: memory.

First though, let's fire up Open Office. Then go to the Tools menu and click Options. Here a user can customize many things in Open Office. For this excercise, under the OpenOffice.org heading along the left side, select Memory. By default, Open Office is set to only use 9 MB of memory for graphics cache. To put it in the words of some famous person from long ago concerning those who are short of cache (it's like a joke, only smaller):

"Verily I say unto thee, that sufficeth not."

So what's a mother to do? Set the allowed memory usage higher, of course. How high you wish to set allowed memory depends on your system and the amount of free memory you have to spare. To set, either type the amount (in MB) in the appropriately named Use for OpenOffice.org field under the Graphics Cache section on the right side of the Options menu or use the conveniently placed up arrow (or down arrow if you so wish) beside the number field to manipulate amount of memory to be used. Finally, click OK.

In my personal experience, I've found that beyond a certain point (approximately 33 MB) there's very little or even no observable benefit in performance, though your mileage (kilometredge, etc.) may vary system by system. I currently have mine set to 33 MB and find that to be quite responsive and usable.

So, to recap (or for the impatient):

1. Start OpenOffice.org
2. Click the Tools menu
3. Click Options
4. Click Memory (on left side)
5. Set amount of memory to use under the Graphics Cache
6. Click OK