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- thewump, on 05/28/2008, -2/+63Thanks for putting the time into this. Interesting. For me it's not a deal killer - look at MS Office. It's probably the product that single handedly fueled hardware upgrades for 10 years.
Looking at dates, the release notes from 1.15 is 2005, so when we look at the warm and cold start cycles adding now 50% slower, and compare that to the speed increase of the average machine in the same time period - well I'd say that relative to the average machine, OpenOffice HAS gotten faster - or if someone keeps up to date with hardware then OpenOffice will appear to be faster.
Would be interesting to see this side by side with MS Office. If you want FAST.. try Word from the latest 90s.. Zoom Zoom - even though at the time IT was considered a bloated dog compared to 95. - Ouze, on 05/29/2008, -7/+46for those that's don't want to wade through all that, here is the summary: "no".
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -1/+26The axes are the default settings of the well-respected statistical program R. If I did set the axes at X, the charts would be tiny and harder to read. If I meant to be dishonest, there were plenty of ways I could do it. Did I have to repeat the tests? No. Did I have to include a boxplot? No. Did I have to include versions in such a way that shows some of OOo is getting slower? No. Did I have to include tests (such as exporting) that shows parts of OOo are getting slower? No. In fact, this article took me an extra month at least to come up with better data with lower standard deviations. All together, this article took me about three months to write.
- ssam, on 05/28/2008, -3/+28Its great to see benchmarks done by someone who understands how important error bars are. i wish phoronix.com would figure this out.
- ssam, on 05/28/2008, -1/+24your CPU may have gotten faster, but i bet you hard disk seek time has not improved.
- inactive, on 05/28/2008, -7/+23That was a very good article. A lot of work went into that analysis.
I had never heard of Wirth's Law but I've complained for years how computers run effectively as fast as they did years and years ago. (In particular Windows boxes. Linux machines are, I think, starting to break this trend.) I take issue with Wirth's idea that "newer software does more work"; this is obviously true in most apps but in many cases the feature sets of new software are *effectively* the same as old software. So why change? I have a whole rant on this that ventures into conspiracy theory territory. I think that Intel and Microsoft have a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" deal where Microsoft writes intentionally heavy code such that it requires the latest Intel hardware, like an Intel CPU, to best run the new Windows: a perfect symbiotic relationship. Remember when MS office paper clip was introduced? Intentional bloat in my opinion. At the very least it's a plausible scenario that would benefit both sides financially so I'm less skeptical about this than I usually am when it comes to most conspiracy theories. - TenebrousX, on 05/29/2008, -0/+15For me, Office 2007 is much snappier than 2003, though it lags sometimes when I scroll through the ribbon
- xevidentx, on 05/29/2008, -2/+17i tried using OO... i can honestly say that it doesn't hold a candle to office 2007. sure it has all the basic functionality, but office 2007 has a polish that OO only wishes to have. and for $20 (my employer has a MS discount) it's a deal!
- inactive, on 05/29/2008, -2/+16Start Open Office and click on Tools > Options. This should open the configuration. Click on Memory in the left menu and change the following settings:
* Number of Steps: 30
* Use for Open Office: 128
* Memory per Object: 20
* Number of Objects: 20
Click on Java in the left menu afterwards and uncheck "Use a Java Runtime Environment". Click OK and restart Open Office to see how fast it is now. - LocalDocal, on 05/29/2008, -1/+13What's inaccurate? The article title asks whether OO is getting faster and the subtitle doesn't make any definitive statement saying 'yes' or 'no'.
- buckrogers1965, on 05/29/2008, -0/+12Seek times are about the same. That depends on rotation speed and that hasn't increased much in years. If you went to a laptop from a desktop, your seek time increased because laptop drives are slow for energy and sound savings.
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -1/+12Thanks for recognizing the value of the data, but which conclusions do you disagree with?
- richbradshaw, on 05/29/2008, -1/+12My EEE running OO has an SSD, so I'd say that seek times are better. OO loads quicker on the EEE than my desktop PC - seek time is more important that processor time.
- daveisfera, on 05/29/2008, -4/+15I can't say that I agree fully agree with the conculsions, but it's good to see some actual numbers instead of just claims about it being slower/faster.
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -0/+10OK, here you go. Y starts at 0.
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/05/responses-to-is-op ... - inactive, on 05/29/2008, -0/+9Faster computers = more room for programmers to be lazy. The faster the machine, the less time is taken to optimize the code for better performance.
That's all there is to it. - biogears, on 05/29/2008, -2/+10Digg distortion strikes again.
Why is an article about OpenOffice getting slower entitled "Is OpenOffice.org Getting Faster?" ?
If this was an article about how Windows was getting faster, the Digg headline would be "Is Windows getting slower?". - sapped, on 05/29/2008, -0/+8Hmm, I have heard some interesting definitions of fun in my life, but I don't think I would have tagged a win95 + office install as fun.
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -0/+8I didn't expect to hear about it so soon, but there was a recent announcement about a 256GB SSD. With this kind of capacity, it may be feasible to use SSDs in more mainstream desktops. That's more capacity than I have in two HDDs in my home PC.
- Hiltonizer, on 05/29/2008, -4/+12I'd like to see how this compares to IBM's rebuild of OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony
- coheedcollapse, on 05/29/2008, -6/+13I haven't used OpenOffice for a while (since I picked up a free copy of MS Office from my school last year), but my only complaint with it was the lack of speed. If they keep on working on it, I'd love to switch back.
- robojerk, on 05/29/2008, -0/+6Koffice 2.0 alpha now runs on Windows, anyone play with it yet???
- gotamd, on 05/29/2008, -0/+6That was anticlimactic.
- JepthaAxe, on 05/29/2008, -0/+6GUI is overrated. It's all about content, man -- your content.
Go Wordstar! - ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -1/+7There is not a one word answer to the question. Some of OpenOffice.org is getting faster. I would say the most important part (startup speed) is in that category.
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -0/+51. Yes. I tried to stay as close as possible to the defaults without making optimizations.
2. I plan to test that in another article in the near future. Also, I think I may know a try to make Java load faster, but I want the data to give the answer. - lamiaconfitor, on 05/29/2008, -1/+6Do you even own a computer? Photoshop does have its own proprietary format, but you can also save it in virtually any image type on the known planet. I honestly cant speak for autocad, as my experience is limited, but that is pretty much an industry standard in the drafting profession and any other computer you wold work on a drafting project would have autocad installed anyway.
as for odf files, they OO.o has a strange thing called a "drop down menu" when you save the file where you can choose the file format, including... wait for it... .doc files! - oobuntu, on 05/29/2008, -1/+6@godzillawax
Do you have some other data which disagrees with this then?
I wouldn't like to work in an office with you: "i don't like the results, therefore it is wrong". - Anonyblessed, on 05/29/2008, -0/+5or just follow the original doc.
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/memory/inde ...
or http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/8308 - FKnight, on 05/29/2008, -5/+10Wow, aajjcckk, I apparently sure know an ad when I see one. I laughed at the visual I got in my head of you sitting there with your face red, seething in anger while trying to use Excel, and then the cut over to the Calgon-Esque relief of Open Office on your computer.
Your comment is so full of cliche and hyperbole, the only thing I can think of is all of those bid requests on "rentacoder.com" for people looking for a job "typing comments on websites." - hasslinthehoff, on 05/29/2008, -3/+8The real question is... is Microsoft Office getting cheaper? No? Then use OpenOffice, morons.
- LastDitchHero, on 05/29/2008, -2/+7Disable MS Source engine in your MS Config then try it
- tempusrob, on 05/29/2008, -1/+6Does godzillaWax eat babies?
Logic like yours is why news media (I'm looking at you, Fox) can get away with so many leading-question headlines to begin with. - inactive, on 05/29/2008, -0/+5Yeah, because Windows 95 SMP support for modern multi-core processors is epic!
- chaos7, on 05/29/2008, -0/+5especially dugg for explaining Wirth's Law
- ethamajin, on 05/29/2008, -0/+4Good article but bad graph scaling. They make it look like performance has doubled in some cases, where it has really only improved slightly.
- kryptogrowl, on 05/29/2008, -3/+7My main complaint with Oo is the user interface, not it's bloat. To me it seems no slower than MS Office. It really needs a gui facelift more than anything.
- ahz1, on 05/29/2008, -0/+4The chart scales are redone here http://www.oooninja.com/2008/05/responses-to-is-op ...
- kinggimped, on 05/29/2008, -2/+6Agreed. I see Office 2007 as the only truly decent product that Microsoft have pushed out of their cheeks for a very long time. I love it, it's a huge improvement over XP/2003, and it runs nice and fast too.
OpenOffice is *awful*, but it is a fantastic bit of software considering that it costs *nothing*. - igeoffi, on 05/29/2008, -1/+5I believe the graphs are fine. I'm pretty sure in statistics graphs do not have to start at 0. For the every day reader though, not starting the graph at 0 can be misleading.
- BrokenBrick, on 05/29/2008, -1/+5Hmmm.... AbiWord anyone? Sure, it can't spell "can't" but its fast and free too
- JMSantos, on 05/29/2008, -2/+6On the other hand, you don't create these types of graphs for "the every day reader."
- PhireN, on 05/29/2008, -0/+3ahz1,
Sorry for the harsh comment, I had just attended a lecture about misleading graphs yesterday (it was a Human Computer Interfaces paper).
In this case it probably didn't matter to much, but I think graphs that don't start at zero be more clearly labeled as such, instead of leaving the reader to check it out themselfs.
I guess I just took out my anger of the mainstream media (and their common abuse of graphs) on you, TV's and Newspapers don't have handy commenting/feedback systems.
Your actual article, (once I looked past the slight defects in the graphs) was very inserting. - lamiaconfitor, on 05/29/2008, -1/+4Who in the hell hires people to 'advertise' for free software? there are no advertisements on the OO.o site
- bluntphallus, on 05/29/2008, -2/+5Long story short: "***** Microsoft." Why don't you just say that instead of churning out an anecdote?
- Tenoq, on 05/30/2008, -0/+3ahz1 - now you just need to decide between two 9800GX2s or a new HDD.
Hmmm. - SolidSnak, on 05/29/2008, -0/+3that made it about 10 times faster.......wow
- buckrogers1965, on 05/29/2008, -1/+4Something fun to do is to put windows 95 on a brand new machine, and load office 4.2 and see how fast things go.
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