Saw this on /.
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/27/1425232.shtml?tid=185
After spending an entire ITEC exposition extolling the virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo has memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
I'll admit that I haven't used M$ Office all that much, but I don't seem to notice a significant time period between running OOo and starting to write a document or create a spreadsheet.
Has anyone else who uses both noticed the kind of lag on OOo that the article author describes?
The Slashdot replies also go into the point that most people have M$ Office already, legally or illegally, so we can't talk "free" without running up against all the illegal copies out there which were also, technically, "free".
One Slashdot reply says that Longhorn will make the "free" case for OOo by preventing people from running illegal copies of M$ software. Does anyone know about this in more detail?
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Usually I subscribe to the philosophy of "what goes on in slashdot stays in slashdot." But since we had an interesting discussion in the irc channel reguarding RAM and kernel configurables, I suppose I can use this as a jumping board for further discussion.
Frankly, OO.o suffers the same amount of salesmanship when presented by OSS advocates as any other piece of software. And a threatening blog post won't effectively change anything about it, even when given high visibility via slashdot. Partly, you need the will to change, not just the will to criticize. Bootchart.org is a good example. Someone suspected that Linux boot time was bad and put forth a challenge to the general public to cobble together a tool to graphically represent the boot process. The result was a tool easily adopted for various distributions, and across the board competition among distros to eliminate obvious bottlenecks. This cases feels related; both need some metrics and visualization before significant improvements can be made. In neither OO.o nor boot time has vocal dissatisfaction with Free software measurably improved things.
But on to the interesting bit. Given that we have copious amounts of RAM these days, and long uptimes, many people like to work around the problem of OO.o and other memory hogs by simply buying tons of memory and leaving the apps open at all times. They reason that with enough RAM VM shouldn't swap out their programs, even though they don't use them often. The frequent foil to this however, is the dreaded disk intensive cron job. A hungry updatedb process can easily chew through disk cache and scare an unused OO.o out of RAM in the quest for more cache. The result is a ponderous computer when you wake up in the morning or after any disk intensive activity.
One solution, that a fellow LUG'er found useful was the kernel's swappiness setting. This parameter affects a kernel's desire to swap things out. People who utterly despise swap might consider setting swappinnes to zero. The maintainer has previously suggested on lkml that he runs his desktop at 100. I've decided to try it out, with no serious consequences so far, but no really noticable benefits either.
jldugger
On 10/27/05, Leo Mauler webgiant@yahoo.com wrote:
Saw this on /.
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/27/1425232.shtml?tid=185
After spending an entire ITEC exposition extolling the virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo has memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
I'll admit that I haven't used M$ Office all that much, but I don't seem to notice a significant time period between running OOo and starting to write a document or create a spreadsheet.
Has anyone else who uses both noticed the kind of lag on OOo that the article author describes?
The Slashdot replies also go into the point that most people have M$ Office already, legally or illegally, so we can't talk "free" without running up against all the illegal copies out there which were also, technically, "free".
One Slashdot reply says that Longhorn will make the "free" case for OOo by preventing people from running illegal copies of M$ software. Does anyone know about this in more detail?
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Very interesting post, Justin!
I have to admit, this is one of the quagmires that i've seen out these days. Right now, where I work we are nothing but a 100% Microsoft shop. I gotta put up with the net admin hounding me about Linux vs Microsoft, TCO's, etc etc.
Quite frankly, while he has a lot of valid arguements, (training costs, training time) one arguement that hurts BOTH sides is the memory utilitization.
I'm a lot like many of the IT pros out there.. I prefer to leave my desktop on, all the time. Saves us all trouble from logging in, starting up, waiting for the pc to become useful, right ? The downside is.. the longer the system stays up, the more memory hogs that can get loaded. This same issue attacks Linux as well.
Whenever I hear problems like this, I prefer to tell the user to try rebooting first, clear out the memory. Usually works. OpenOffice only slows down for me when I have had like 30 apps open for 24 hours or so (i've done 40 acrowss the 4 desktops i had in Gentoo once.. slowest machine I've ever seen).
General Rule of thumb I've discovered: For every day loaded, consider 24MB of RAM used. for every week of uptime, 100MB of RAM. That's the bare essentials, not counting any apps that might be loaded at the time.
but as always..
Your Mileage May Vary
-- Joe Brouhard 1st Degree Black Belt Decided Certified Trainer \ Demo Team Captain Chan's ATA Leadership and Black Belt Academy jbrouhard@chansata.com
On Friday 28 October 2005 04:20, Leo Mauler wrote:
After spending an entire ITEC exposition extolling the virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo has memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
I'll admit that I haven't used M$ Office all that much, but I don't seem to notice a significant time period between running OOo and starting to write a document or create a spreadsheet.
Has anyone else who uses both noticed the kind of lag on OOo that the article author describes?
OOo has always seemed bloated and slow to me, so I treat it fairly similar to Mozilla/FireFox: It's the best you can get for crapOS/Windows, but probably the worst for every other OS.
KOffice does more than I'll ever need.
Well, I don't know what effect this has, but on my desktop system, I've put the OOo quickstarter on my control panel and I find that office starts fairly quick for me. First time after the computer wakes up, takes about 6 seconds, and every time after that about 2. I'm running on what can only be considered "old" hardware now, a 1.3 GHz Athlon w/ .5 GB RAM. Of course with only 256 MB RAM it would be slower, I don't get a lot of disc caching anymore. I'm quite happy with OOo these days. Except for some personal quibbles not related to performance.
My $0.02, Brian JD
--- Luke-Jr wrote:
On Friday 28 October 2005 04:20, Leo Mauler wrote:
After spending an entire ITEC exposition extolling
the
virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo
has
memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
...
OOo has always seemed bloated and slow to me, so I treat it fairly similar to Mozilla/FireFox: It's the best you can get for crapOS/Windows, but probably the worst for every other OS.
Why?
KOffice does more than I'll ever need.
KOffice is nice too.
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:44:47 -0700 (PDT) Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:
Well, I don't know what effect this has, but on my desktop system, I've put the OOo quickstarter on my control panel and I find that office starts fairly quick for me. First time after the computer wakes up, takes about 6 seconds, and every time after that about 2. I'm running on what can only be considered "old" hardware now, a 1.3 GHz Athlon w/ .5 GB RAM. Of course with only 256 MB RAM it would be slower, I don't get a lot of disc caching anymore. I'm quite happy with OOo these days. Except for some personal quibbles not related to performance.
Spotted this article are on speeding up OOo. I made the changes on my system and it does feel a touch faster. YMMV.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27292
--------------------------------- Frank Wiles frank@wiles.org http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------
Here's a question: just what does OOo use Java for? If its something most people don't use, then I'd feel better about turning off Java (like the article suggests).
I've always been worried about installing OOo before installing Java because of that screen during the OOo installer demanding a Java installation. If I don't really need Java for OOo then I'd much prefer not to run it with OOo.
--- Frank Wiles frank@wiles.org wrote:
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:44:47 -0700 (PDT) Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:
Well, I don't know what effect this has, but on my desktop system, I've put the OOo quickstarter on my control panel and I find that office starts fairly quick for me. First time after the computer wakes up, takes
about 6
seconds, and every time after that about 2. I'm running on what can only be considered "old" hardware now, a 1.3 GHz Athlon w/ .5 GB RAM. Of course with only
256
MB RAM it would be slower, I don't get a lot of
disc
caching anymore. I'm quite happy with OOo these
days.
Except for some personal quibbles not related to performance.
Spotted this article are on speeding up OOo. I made the changes on my system and it does feel a touch faster. YMMV.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27292
Frank Wiles frank@wiles.org http://www.wiles.org
Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
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On Saturday 29 October 2005 12:36 pm, Leo Mauler wrote:
Here's a question: just what does OOo use Java for? If its something most people don't use, then I'd feel better about turning off Java (like the article suggests).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openoffice#Java_controversy
--- Jason Clinton me@jasonclinton.com wrote:
On Saturday 29 October 2005 12:36 pm, Leo Mauler wrote:
Here's a question: just what does OOo use Java for? If its something most people don't use, then I'd feel better about turning off Java (like the article suggests).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openoffice#Java_controversy
Oh great. Any FOSS CD with OpenOffice.org on it would need a non-FOSS Java installer on it too for a lot of things (and I presume that Java has restrictive redistribution licensing...):
* Parts of the Base application * The media player * Mail merge to e-mail (requires Java Mail) * All document wizards in Writer * Accessibility tools * Report Autopilot * JDBC driver support * XSLT filters * BeanShell, the NetBeans scripting language, and the Java UNO bridge * Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm OS or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC
I find it somewhat reprehensible that the Accessibility tools require Java, as if it wasn't already going to be processor and memory intensive to allow people with disabilities to use the office suite.
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On Sunday 30 October 2005 02:28 pm, Leo Mauler wrote:
I find it somewhat reprehensible that the Accessibility tools require Java, as if it wasn't already going to be processor and memory intensive to allow people with disabilities to use the office suite.
I find Java as reprehensible as the next guy but there is hope. There is now a fairly complete Java front-end to GCC which compiles Java to native code called GCJ. It requires a support library called libgcj and it isn't very optimized yet but it requires a _LOT_ less space than the JRE's distributed by Sun and IBM. Also check out the Classpath project which is working on implementing the Java standard library.
Leo Mauler wrote:
Oh great. Any FOSS CD with OpenOffice.org on it would need a non-FOSS Java installer on it too for a lot of things (and I presume that Java has restrictive redistribution licensing...):
My new Kubuntu installation uses a JRE from the Free Software Foundation in OOo. I'm pretty sure that would not be license encumbered. I'll check the Windows version tomorrow to see what it uses. Don't most people already have a JRE already? Talk about bloatware. I hope that this FSF version is better.
Peace, Jim
--- Jim Herrmann wrote:
Leo Mauler wrote:
Oh great. Any FOSS CD with OpenOffice.org on it
would
need a non-FOSS Java installer on it too for a lot
of
things (and I presume that Java has restrictive redistribution licensing...):
My new Kubuntu installation uses a JRE from the Free Software Foundation in OOo. I'm pretty sure that would not be license encumbered.
I don't know why people are so concerned about Java, or surprised to find java code in Openoffice. It's sort of like being upset when someon includes PHP in a php shoppingcart application. Openoffice was written by Java coders from Sun, people tend to reuse code they've written for other application when writing new ones. I also have never seen anything so restricvtive in Java licensing. Sure it's not as open as GPL, so what? There are GPL Java RE versions out there. Use one of them if you are so against Java licensing. Only, be aware these are not as well supported and functional ... yet. All this attacking those bearing gifts is a bit over the top. Someone makes a really sophisticated office application, albeit a bit heavy on resources, available for free (as in beer and as in speech), and what thanks do they? I'd like to see someon else write such a sophisticated app and do it in a less resource intensive way. It's not easy write a million lines of code and do it in a way that is the most efficient. While Koffice is great, there are things OO can do that aren't possible to do in KWord or in MS Word for that matter.
On Wednesday 02 November 2005 06:13 am, Jack wrote:
--- Jim Herrmann wrote:
Leo Mauler wrote:
Oh great. Any FOSS CD with OpenOffice.org on it
would
need a non-FOSS Java installer on it too for a lot
of
things (and I presume that Java has restrictive redistribution licensing...):
My new Kubuntu installation uses a JRE from the Free Software Foundation in OOo. I'm pretty sure that would not be license encumbered.
I don't know why people are so concerned about Java, or surprised to find java code in Openoffice. It's sort of like being upset when someon includes PHP in a php shoppingcart application. Openoffice was written by Java coders from Sun, people tend to reuse code they've written for other application when writing new ones. I also have never seen anything so restricvtive in Java licensing. Sure it's not as open as GPL, so what? There are GPL Java RE versions out there. Use one of them if you are so against Java licensing. Only, be aware these are not as well supported and functional ... yet.
Well, all the hubbub is about the "Java Trap" which RMS has written extensively about. This OpenOffice.org move to require Java has prodded the FSF Java implementations along quite a bit. So without all that complaigning, that might have never happened.
All this attacking those bearing gifts is a bit over the top. Someone makes a really sophisticated office application, albeit a bit heavy on resources, available for free (as in beer and as in speech), and what thanks do they? I'd like to see someon else write such a sophisticated app and do it in a less resource intensive way. It's not easy write a million lines of code and do it in a way that is the most efficient. While Koffice is great, there are things OO can do that aren't possible to do in KWord or in MS Word for that matter.
I hope that people don't think we're attacking. Clearly the OO.o guys are doing the best they can with the crappy StarOffice 5.2 code-base they had to start with. The grumbling is trying to get someone to pay attention to just /how/ bloated it is. As a comparison, OpenOffice is 5.2 million lines of code; the entirety of KDE (with Konqueror, all its video games, the window manager, KOffice, a full email, contact and calendar suite, and a plethora of other tools) comes in at only 4.2 million lines of code. So, clearly, someone here is doing more with less. And that's what we want.
See here for a better breakdown: http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2005/10/29#kloc http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/10/november-travel-halloween-qt4-easter.html
Leo Mauler wrote:
--- Jason Clinton me@jasonclinton.com wrote:
On Saturday 29 October 2005 12:36 pm, Leo Mauler wrote:
Here's a question: just what does OOo use Java for? If its something most people don't use, then I'd feel better about turning off Java (like the article suggests).
The FSF is working on a version of OpenOffice that uses GCJ instead of Suns JVM. So hopefully there will soon be a fully open version of openoffice. http://www.fsf.org/news/open-office-java.html
Yeah, that's what OOo in Kubuntu 5.10 is using.
Chad Phillips wrote:
The FSF is working on a version of OpenOffice that uses GCJ instead of Suns JVM. So hopefully there will soon be a fully open version of openoffice. http://www.fsf.org/news/open-office-java.html
Well whats interesting is that my laptop only has 128MB of RAM and I've never had more than a couple second delay between opening OpenOffice.org and getting into the document. I too have the Quickstarter in RAM though.
I haven't tried running more than one OOo application at once, mostly using Writer and occasionally Calc.
--- Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:
Well, I don't know what effect this has, but on my desktop system, I've put the OOo quickstarter on my control panel and I find that office starts fairly quick for me. First time after the computer wakes up, takes about 6 seconds, and every time after that about 2. I'm running on what can only be considered "old" hardware now, a 1.3 GHz Athlon w/ .5 GB RAM. Of course with only 256 MB RAM it would be slower, I don't get a lot of disc caching anymore. I'm quite happy with OOo these days. Except for some personal quibbles not related to performance.
My $0.02, Brian JD
--- Luke-Jr wrote:
On Friday 28 October 2005 04:20, Leo Mauler wrote:
After spending an entire ITEC exposition
extolling
the
virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo
has
memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
...
OOo has always seemed bloated and slow to me, so I treat it fairly similar to Mozilla/FireFox: It's the best you can get for crapOS/Windows, but probably the worst for every other OS.
Why?
KOffice does more than I'll ever need.
KOffice is nice too. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
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