[Gllug] Office Alternatives

[Vidar Hokstad]

On 22 May 2008, at 00:07, James Roberts wrote:
> Time to open Win OOo Writer (2.4):
>
> - Average over ten trials: 2.4 sec (no tray preloader)

Average is extremely misleading unless you reboot in between or make  
sure
it's all paged out.

Shortest I've gotten with 2.4 is 15 sec or so, even worse on Mac where  
2.4
needs to start the X server if it's not already running (which it  
rarely is). With
the 3.0 beta it's down to about  6 seconds on first start, which isn't  
great, but
certainly tolerable.

Subsequent starts are far faster _if_ I haven't done anything in the  
meantime
to page it out, which essentially means I never see it happen other  
than in test
situations.

> Time to open any of a whole lot of docs (*.odt): can't accurately time
> it, they all are much less than 1 second.

I've yet to see a Writer window open in less than 2 seconds, and that  
applies
even with the 3.0 beta, which is far faster for me.

> Admittedly, this is on good hardware (Q6600, 4.5GB RAM) but I have
> noticed no particular slowness on my Win Sony Centrino laptop which  
> has
> a single core mobile chip and 2GB.

I've tested in both on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB RAM running
10.5.1 and a MacBook Pro still running 10.5, the latter with 3GB RAM.

My wife also complains about the same poor performance on her Sony Vaio,
which is slightly lower spec'ed and with only 1GB, and I've previously  
seen
the same on my dual Xeon home server (Linux) with 4GB RAM, as well as
my old IBM Thinkpad laptop.

On most of these machines I've regularly been running Pages or Word  
(the Mac's)
or AbiWord (the Linux box) as alternatives the few times I need more  
than what
Google Docs provides (which consistently beat all of them in loading  
time for me),
and they've consistently started in a fraction of the time OOo has  
started in

If I'd ever gotten the kind of startup times you quote, I'd have been  
ecstatic.

As I wrote in another message, though, the 3.0 beta is massively  
improved, and
I think it's gotten the startup times down to levels where I can  
tolerate it.

-- 
Vidar Hokstad
Technical Director
Aardvark Media Limited
Mobile: 0795 867 7857
Direct Dial: 020 7183 2740

2 Fulham Business Exchange
The Boulevard
Imperial Wharf
London
SW6 2TL




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