OpenOffice Bloated? 941
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."
I know the problem! (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Consider the Source (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:5, Informative)
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:GUI (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:5, Informative)
On its face (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:5, Informative)
He provided the test data here [lanarchitect.net] and here [lanarchitect.net]
NeoOfficeJ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:5, Informative)
Bought (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
More info on the source.... (Score:4, Informative)
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]
So true (Score:5, Informative)
No kidding... (Score:3, Informative)
I can start Mac Pages, Inkscape, Keynote and even the Gimp before NeoOfficeJ is finished loading. Now that's slow.
Re:I know the problem! (Score:2, Informative)
I think it was Corel Draw that was released as a Java port a bunch of years ago.
You've got it partly right, it was Corel but the application was WordPerfect.
OpenOffice.org is not written in Java (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Lets see... (Score:4, Informative)
Disable Java option... (Score:5, Informative)
That is not ad hominem (Score:5, Informative)
Your slur on his 2 digit ID, however, is completely off topic. Google for "petard, hoist upon".
OO copies rather than innovates (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GUI (Score:5, Informative)
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:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:3, Informative)
You've got to be kidding me. OO has never been faster than any version of MS Office I have ever tried. Without that "booster" application sitting in your system tray the individual applications take usually about 2x as long to load and be in a usable state as the equivalent MS Office application.
Now, on to some real numbers. I'm timing this with my watch so you'll have to forgive the ~1 second resolution. I perform each test several times to ensure that disk I/O doesn't taint the numbers.
A random excel spreadsheet on my desktop that calculates some manufacturing costs.
XLS format - 1980 kb
Opening in Excel XP (this includes the time to load excel)
Less than 1 second
Opening XLS file in OO (Calc already loaded)
5 seconds
Ok. To be fair we should save the spreadsheet in OO format so the converter isn't required. Let's test save times first though.
Save as new XLS file under Excel XP
3 seconds
Save as new XLS file in OO
3 seconds
Save as new native file in OO
4 seconds
Ok. Let's see how long it takes OO to open a document saved in native format.
Open ODS file in OO (Calc already loaded)
7 seconds (not surprised - XML processing is sssllllooooowwwww)
And finally, on to memory usage with said spreadsheet loaded:
OO Calc - 67 meg
Excel - 15 meg
I won't even mention the issues with things like the noticable delay between the time you click the menu and the time it appears. Don't get me wrong - OO 2.0 is a nice office suite but don't claim it "run laps around" MS Office. That isn't true by any stretch of the imagination.
Re:Abiword, Gnumeric, KOffice (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Perhaps the reason is... (Score:3, Informative)
External XML (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Methodology (Score:3, Informative)
Was it the same machine
Yes
What distro
No distro - it was openoffice for windows
Sounds like another MS shill to me.
And you sound like a FOSS shill to me..
Openoffice is bloated. Anyone who has used it should realize. We know it, but we have no OSS alternative to it, so...
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:3, Informative)
I tried it myself on my P4 1.8GHz: the first start (with java) took about 15s, subsequent starts (with java) took 7s. After disabling java, the startup time didn't improve. All times are handstoped with a wrist watch, so YMMV.
Re:Actually. (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, here are my benchmark results: (Score:3, Informative)
On a 3.06 GHz Intel with hyperthreading on (though it makes no difference) and 2 Gig of ram
OO 1.9.122 vs Excel 2002 SP3
3.4 Meg SVX file vs 191 meg xlm
File load: SXC OO ~3 minutes , XML Excel ~ 1 minute (not including time to unzip and open from withing excel).
Memory use (meg): min/typical/max OO 13/115/212 excel 4/45/65 (yes, 4 meg with a 191 meg file open, go figure !?!?!)
proc load: 100% during load times for both on "1" processor (HT did not help)
I saved the sxc file as ods and xls versions (hadn't figured out loading the zip into excel at that point). 3.9 meg and 49.5 meg file size repectively.
File load: ods OO ~1 minute, xls Excel ~3 seconds
Memory use (meg): min/typical/max OO ?/72/72 Excel ?/91/91
proc load: 100% during load times for both on "1" processor (HT did not help)
Seems the Excel has some advantage in extreme situations but the caveat mileage may vary seems to apply.
If OO would run twice as fast or use half the memory, I'd be willing to pay twice as much!
Re:How much difference between Java and C++? (Score:3, Informative)
No, the only post that seems to complain about long startup times is dealing with the case where there is NO JVM INSTALLED, but OO is looking for one.
Disabling Java support resulted in vastly improved startup times.
Since OO was no longer searching for a JVM that wasn't there in the first place...
That does lead us to believe that Java is somewhat responsible for some of the problems that have been noted.
Logic error, retrying....
Note: GP is correct (Score:5, Informative)
"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:
But I'm not surprised that you're incorrect, since Anonymous Cowards usually are. ;-)
Re:Disable Java option... (Score:4, Informative)
hsqldb.org [hsqldb.org]
I'm not sure if JDBC drivers are used for all external dbs, but probably.
Re:No Office Gripes (Score:5, Informative)
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]
Re:erm.. (Score:3, Informative)
From my personal experience, OOo takes at least 20 seconds to load on a reasonable machine. Suppose I start OOo once every day (not very unrealistic) that would mean some 120 minutes lost. That would result in 2280 years lost over the population of OOo users. Tends to put load-times in perspective, doesn't it?
Abiword and Gnumeric do fine for me personally and start in a flash. Now if my boss would stop sending me .ppt's I could finally get rid of OOo for good. Speaking of which, the latest Abiword can handle ODF! \o/
Re:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Consider the Source (Score:3, Informative)
I can understand yours and the parent poster's reservation about the article's authors bias IF the article was just stating his opinions, which would be impossible to prove false, but...
BUT HE ACTUALLY POSTED NUMBERS!!!
You don't like the results? Just do the tests yourself. We are not talking about global warming here. Just load both apps, creates some files and see how long it takes to open it.
If you think he is biased and is wrong, just go ahead and PROVE IT!!!
Gosh, don't we have enough people right now (re: media) who confuse facts with opinions? I think we can do better than that hear at Slashdot.
Re:Who's bloated and where? (Score:3, Informative)
I've wondered that myself, but unfortunatley its rather difficult to make that comparison. MSO for the Mac uses Apple's native Quartz windowing system, whereas there really isn't a full port of OOo to the Mac yet - you have to choose between OOo for X11 or NeoOffice (Java-heavy OOo)... both of which tend to be incomplete and/or several versions behind. Since the X11 emulator and JVM are launched on demand of the apps, OOo will always feel quite sluggish, and its difficult do determine how much of the RAM footprint is due to that key difference. Its a real drag, which is why I abandoned OOo in favor of MSO on my powerbook, whereas OOo on my Linux & Windows PC's is just fine and dandy.
Kind of a tangent, but I would be interested to see the memory comparison of MSO to iWork. Of course, then we're trusting that Apple doesn't "hide" any code
Re:The one key difference (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Don't compare apples to oranges (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:GUI (Score:2, Informative)
AbiWord v2.4.1 vs Word 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No kidding... (Score:3, Informative)
Besides NeoOffice isn't a mac port per se. Its just re-implementing the X11 version of OpenOffice.org for the mac as a java application.
If you can start up all those programs before NeoOffice you either have something wrong with your setup or are a troll. Which one are you?
Re:Consider the Source (Score:3, Informative)
Up to about three years ago, this translated in a comparable increase in system performance. If you look at system performance now compared to back when Northwood/HT was introduced, the only thing that sort-of-doubled performance since then is dual-core. Add marginal clock increases and infrastructure upgrades and you get a ~3X boost over the last three years rather than 4X. They can keep doubling transistor count by doubling caches and core counts but beyond 2MB caches and quad-core, we're deep in the land of diminishing returns.
Now, it takes nearly triple the transistors to double performance, bringing the performance-doubling cycle closer to 24 months... and even longer in the not-so-distant future.
Re:"Essentially" the same data? (Score:2, Informative)
And yes, OO.org is based off of star office.
Re:I would actually buy Office (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who's bloated and where? (Score:3, Informative)
(All on a 1GHz Powerbook, 750MB RAM)
Footprint with a blank doc:
NeoOffice/J Writer 74MB
MS Word 20 MB
Footprint after loading a 750kB html file:
Writer - 103MB
Word - 31MB
Launch time:
Word 17 seconds first time, second time was 6 seconds
Writer 47 seconds first time, second time was 17 seconds
Word Document open time:
Word - 3 seconds
Writer - 16 seconds
Opening a
Word - 3 seconds
Writer - 5 seconds
Opening a
Word - 5s
Writer - 5s
Not looking too good for OOo there...
SSE2 floating enabled? (Score:2, Informative)
On my Fedora system, the OOo calc package lists i386 as the architecture, so I'm wondering if SSE/SSE2 floating point is enabled. The old stack-based floating point is slow.
Excel is *not* excellent (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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? (Score:3, Informative)
For thoe who don't recognise it:
http://www.pion.ch/Fun/funniest.html [www.pion.ch]
See what I found in the newsgroups comp.office.app (Score:2, Informative)
From: Guy de'Geek
Newsgroups: comp.office.app
Subject: What would you like to see most in openoffice?
Summary: small poll for my new office suite
Date: 25 Oct 2005 20:57:08 GMT
Hello everybody out there using OpenOffice -
I'm doing a (free) office suite (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like OOo) for 586(686) stones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in openoffice, as my suite resembles it somewhat
(same layout of the GUI (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I've currently done numberscruncher and wordscruncher apps, and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them
PS. Yes - it's free of any openoffice code, and it is fast,
multi-threaded and not greedy to resources. It has descent charting too.
~~~~~
So there is hope...
OpenOffice saved me MUCHO time today over Excel (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So true (Score:2, Informative)
The horrible truth is that graphing, in general, tends to suck in all office packages. Back in the DOS era, I was a schoolkid and the only thing we had that could make graphs was Works, and it was really pain after a while (and this was just school project stuff, nothing as glorious as 10000 item plots); then, for me, came a long lull of not needing to do any graphing, and recently, now that I've had to fight Excel and OO.o, they've made the whole thing "easier" and almost impossible to use effectively for anything
Nowadays I keep going back to GNUPLOT [gnuplot.info] if I want to graph something. Pain to work with (no "click and it does it"), but at least it gives understandable output without too much messing. Export stuff to CSV from OpenOffice.org Calc, let GNUPLOT shred it for a while, and it spits out EPS. Works perfectly each time, plus the graphs it makes have "dull scientific" look rather than "idiotic business" look, and I prefer dull scientific look any day =)