Submitted by This is an interesting comparison of OpenOffice 2.0 Calc and MS Office 2003 Excel. The author found that OOo is slow in some operations and takes a lot of RAM & CPU.
Benchmark: Is OpenOffice 2.0’s Calc a Performance Pig?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
…lead balloon. I’ll use OoO2 anyway. It may be slow(er) but it’s still free. How bout that?
…lead balloon.
Or a Led Zeppelin?
this guy keeps writing bad stuff about OOO, I read a similar article by him some times ago, I wonder how much MS are paying him.
George Ou… criticisms of OOo2… zdnet…
This will not turn out well.
I’ve found that when applying a formula to an entire column of cells in version 2 it does take longer than I’m used to with 1.1.4; however, in all fairness I’m quite sure it also supports more math symbols and functions.
Heavy software isn’t always fun, but sometimes it’s a reasonable trade off if the speed is still acceptable, especially when the software in question costs $0 to use on as many computers as you want.
OO.o might not have ideal performance for everyone, but it’s still a nice office suite. Plus with 2.0 now stable the next 2.x releases might feature improved speed.
OOo2.0 also supports 64K rows, whereas 1.1.x could only handle 32K rows.
Yes, I encountered a situation where this was a problem. Blech! Stupid massive CSV files.
this article calls OOo a CPU hog and a memory hog…
Now I cannot talk for the Windows version of OOo, but I do use 1.1.5 version of the Linux version.
It uses less RAM than 1.1.4, and it is faster at loading, however, it is not a cpu hog.
I tested it with gkrellm running and it never went above 8% cpu usage, and this is a 2,.2ghz cpu.
I do agree though that the memory usage and start up times need to be looked at. I have tried OOOQS and this does indeed speed up opening times, but all components of MS Office start in an instant on this PC.. This is impressive, as I am running MS Office under Linux using Crossover, and each component will still load in about 2 seconds.
I think the last version of the 1.1.x series I’ve used has been 1.1.3, and it was unusable with larger xls files. I have even tried to convert it to OO’s native file format, but, to my surprise, that was even slower o.O. Unusable means opening a 3.6 MB (approximately) excel spreadsheet with about 10 worksheets in more than 10 minutes, whereas Excel opened it in cca 10 seconds. That was the point where I stared at it in disbelief, but it was that way all the time.
Ya know, OOo is written for mass appeal. I don’t think anyone writing it was thinking “hey, what about the people who want to use spreadsheets for serious statistical work?” Well, someone probably did, and was probably told “we’ll do that when we have time, these crazy users are harping us about releasing
.”
If you work with big spreadsheets, use the best spreadsheet program available: Microsoft Excel. If you need an office suite to write articles, school papers, or any number of other small tasks: You can probably safely save yourself $300 and just use OpenOffice.
Of course, if you’ve already bought MS Office, you might as well use it until it’s not supported or you see a feature you want somewhere else.
Stop demanding perfection people. You’ll never get it from anyone. No one has time to sit around and write algorithm proofs for your Office suite, and they usually don’t even have time to redesign the unexpectedly slow parts.
I’d hate to work on the OOo team, they get so much guff for things… Probably because people have put OOo up on a pedestal it doesn’t belong on.
‘Stop demanding perfection people’ – I wasn’t, if you were referring to me. I just pointed out that it really is slow sometimes (O.K., most of the time….). I mean, yeah, I own MS Office (academic edition) and I like some parts, hate other ones. E.g. in OO, it’s really nice that you can do almost the same text formatting operations in Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw perhaps, whereas in Excel and Powerpoint, you can’t do some useful stuff from Word. This is just my experience, I don’t demand anything (although it would be nice if OO got faster, etc. ;]). I think if you don’t need all the features Excel and Calc have, try gnumeric. I did, I love it for simpler tasks. It even opens some xls files faster than Excel itself
. The best solution might be using all both Oo and MS Office, since they can actually nicely help each other sometimes.
‘Probably because people have put OOo up on a pedestal it doesn’t belong on.’
Dunno, seems to be the best open source suite in terms of features and stability (I don’t think I remember it crash, could be wrong, though).
Duh, if only I had more time to learn C and C++ better ˘_˘.
If performance is a great issue one should use something like R instead of a spreadsheet. It is much faster than Excel at handling large amounts of data. We use R when analysing DNA chips.
If performance is a great issue one should use something like R instead of a spreadsheet. It is much faster than Excel at handling large amounts of data. We use R when analysing DNA chips.
R is yet another scripting language that the *NIX-heads mistake for an application (like TeX). You have to be crazy to think that it can replace OOo Calc or MS Excel. Nobody wants to learn yet another programming language just so they can generate some charts.
That’s a really bad attitude you have there. You must understand some people, myself included, refuse to learn spreadsheets when they know it’s just a weaker language than they have access to anyway.
People who can actually manipulate complex spreadsheets are perfectly capable of coding the same things, given a few weeks to learn to program. We’re not even talking about difficult programming, we’re talking about really simple math analysis stuff.
Spreadsheets have their place. But I’d agree that it’s not in 19 page calculations..
A lot of people use spreadsheets as a database/tabulation program. Which is fine, for a small amount of stuff; but in the end it’s mass overkill. The only reason it started is just because Excel is *that* good. If Excel had a history like Word, I don’t think you’d see people using it nearly as often as they do: Nobody wants to wait one minute for their program to load so they can checkoff something on a todo list (but Word XP took that long to load
).
People who can actually manipulate complex spreadsheets are perfectly capable of coding the same things, given a few weeks to learn to program.
They may be capable of learning how to program, but why would they want to waste their time? They’d rather spend their time thinking about what to analyze, and what the results mean (doing actual work) rather than wasting time fixing syntax errors, and other work that the programmers should do.
I’m against the whole application as a scripting language design that a lot of *NIX software uses. To me it’s like the developers are just passing the buck to the end users. They are saying: “We don’t know how our end users are going to use our software, and we don’t want to spend the time to find out. So we’re just going to write some API, expose it in a scripting language, and let the users waste their time trying to figure out how to do something useful with it. We’re all too busy reading Slashdot.”
Fixing syntax errors? Only absolute beginners spend a real amount of time fixing syntax errors, well, beginners and c++ developers.
Like I said, really pathetic attitude. For some things, yea a spreadsheet is the way to go, but if you’ve got 3MB of data you’re probably wasting your time on a spreadsheet.
The actual reasoning behind giving users a full out turing complete language is because it has the largest range of theoretically solvable problems: It’s the most powerful. And, for thousands of years, man has solved math problems on paper with math equations: Not with graphical boxy representations of what the data might almost be contorted to sorta look like.
I think many people doing actual statistics work would appreciate a powerful language for expressing their equations, rather than a graphical expression. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I’d say that as a rule mathemeticians/statisticians are much more equation oriented than spacially oriented anyway.
But you’re right. Not assuming how your end users will use your software is a facet of Unix design, and it’s probably the biggest reason why Unix designs are so far superior to their “broken down wizard” counterparts. Not dumbing things down is important, it says “hi, I’m a developer, I’m writing this for users whose intelligence I respect.” Instead of “hi, I’m from marketing, this will do everything for you!”
Not assuming how your end users will use your software is a facet of Unix design, and it’s probably the biggest reason why Unix designs are so far superior to their “broken down wizard” counterparts.
You misspelled knowing and inferior. But knowing some *NIX programmers, I could totally see how they would rather assume how their software is being used rather than go out and find out. That requires * GASP * social interaction.
Thank you for ceding the argument to me by insulting nameless people in a generic and derogatory manner.
I was just about to say people who don’t register a nick are stupid, but you beat me to the punch!
When did I say that R could replace spreadsheets? You are jumping to conclusion because I didn’t make that statement. R is a language and it is very efficient at processing large data sets. Exactly as I said. R is not very relevant for most users. However it would be relevant for that guy with 3 days of 10hz data.
Yeah, well i use Z D and J right now. I mean, its much more cool.
But what could be R.
Do not comment without at least some knowledge (you could google a few secs…), R is a statistics software and a damn good one at that. Ever heard of S?
Z D and J, that is just stupid.
/Lemma
[quote]
Do not comment without at least some knowledge (you could google a few secs…), R is a statistics software and a damn good one at that. Ever heard of S?
[/quote]
Lets Google about ‘R’, shouldn’t be hard to find the right application ^^
Hope you had fun to show us all that you are the best, because you know what ‘R’ is 😛
Lets Google about ‘R’
Obviously you didn’t: http://www.google.com/search?q=r
Err, no, I’m sorry, but you are the twit, sir (yes, I do mean that). Why don’t you stop trying to insult other people, and start reading what other people write?
Any person, even you, should be able to type just “R” into google, and get back a result. That’s exactly four keystrokes for me: Ctrl-K (Firefox shortcut for Google search), R, then enter. Not so hard was it?
And lo and behold, guess what the first reuslt is?
The R Project for Statistical Computing
R, also called GNU S, is a strongly functional language and environment to
statistically explore data sets, make many graphical displays of data from custom …
http://www.r-project.org/ – 2k – Cached – Similar pages
cya,
Victor
>R is a statistics software
And why do you think the rest of the world would know about it? Talking about “just” R as if it is well known?
So I found very convenient this asnwer:
>Z D and J
I even laughed with this becasue I just thought about a similar answer when read about “R”, the point is that you wanted to look cool talking about “R” so the rest of the world would google it -like thinking “R?, what’s that? maybe a wonderful app I didn’t know until today? I have been living all these years and R was just there, my life could have been a lot easyer” …
well I could continue. So don’t talk like that
>Z D and J, that is just stupid.
When it’s you who started talking about “just R”, I repeat R!, great name!
The article needs to share more information. For instance, how did the author come to pick loading and saving spreadsheets for the criteria? Was it just a random pick or did he specifically try and find the one thing OO.o is slowest at? Or perhaps he was just trying out the suite and noticed that saving and loading the spreadsheet seemed slow. My point is, there is no way to tell whether his results are representative of the whole suite or just a single function.
And the memory test is just worthless. Yes, without any data the OO.o apps all use about 30MB more memory than Office does. But at that level no one is running out of memory anyway. And it’s just common sense that OO.o will use more because it’s loading a compatibility layer for all the UI graphics. A better test would be with the spreadsheet he created loaded. Is Office still only 30MB better, or does its lead increase (or decrease) when the suites are actually being used.
I say all this knowing that OO.o is certainly slower and more of a memory hog. Hopefully it will be optimized some in the future point releases, but I wouldn’t expect it to ever be as fast of MS Office. The trick will be getting it fast enough for most people.
OK, I tried looking at the memory used by OO.o 2 and OfficeXP with the spreadsheets he gave loaded. And wow, it was 233MB to 43MB. Maybe all the extra time spent loading was in allocating memory.
On a side note, it seems that this test really favors the Athlon architecture over the P4, at least in OO.o. I only have MS Office on an older computer so I couldn’t compare those times (it was still faster).
What’s more, most of that memory gets paged out to disk, and stays there. While I can’t measure it on Windows, I know on Linux that the amount of physical memory used is around 10MB. Calling it a memory hog doesn’t make much sense therefore.
In any event, 30MB is not that bad these days, that’s what Firefox uses in a typical session.
Also, it’s notable that besides the file save and load benchmarks, the author gives no other example of where OpenOffice uses a lot of CPU. Concluding that the whole suite is a CPU hog based on loading and saving files in one application (and not typical files at that) is a bit rich.
And as far as Excel’s memory usage goes, I think this screenshot (off my PC) is interesting.
http://www.bfeeney.uklinux.net/images/excel-mem.png
On the left, you see the Excel executable file, which is 9.60MB in size according to the details pane. When you start a program, the entire executable is loaded into read-only memory, so we would expect Excel’s memory usage to be around 10MB. However, if you look to the right, you see the Excel memory usage, as measured by the Windows task-manager, is 1,500K in size.
That’s rather odd 😉
What these people fail to realize is that MSFt loads about a dozen extra libraries into memory at boot time just for Office. You can’t measure the size that way.
What i want to see is someone loading Excel through crossover Office on a linux machine and then posting the memory usage. i bet they are a lot closer.
In the end though MSFT has had 12 revisions to make Excel run faster. open Office is basically on 2. and it’s a whole lot faster and more complete than Excel was at that time. Hopefully this will kick start the programmers to clean up the mess a bit.
In the end though MSFT has had 12 revisions to make Excel run faster. open Office is basically on 2. and it’s a whole lot faster and more complete than Excel was at that time. Hopefully this will kick start the programmers to clean up the mess a bit.
Not exactly true. Marco Borries founded StarDivision 21 years ago to develop an office suite. StarOffice went through over 15 years of commercial development as a proprietary office suite before Sun opened it up as OpenOffice.org on the basis of the 5.x release of StarOffice.
The bloat is historical and is part compounded with a history of mixed proprietary and open source development. Remember when Netscape open sourced Navigator, the Mozilla group had to give up on the old codebase and effectively start from scratch as it was so convoluted.
I used Star Office about 5 years ago, I can assure you it’s nothing like OOo. Maybe they managed to use a large amount of code from it.
The problems here are:
Excel is the best program Microsoft ships, it’s their flagship “we have great geniuses working for us” product.
OOo is largely in Java, you can’t check the memory usage. Try, go ahead, you’ll get a wrong answer. It’ll be as accurate as threaded programs memory footprint on Linux (totally wrong).
Those create and load times sound bad, but I wouldn’t worry too awful much. You should see what kspread did with that 3.6MB SXC file… My athlon with 1.25GB of RAM ran out of RAM trying…
Taking 5 times as long as excel to work with this is quite respectable… And, the XLS doesn’t count, of course; we don’t count binary dumps as save operations here in the “we like being able to open files with more than one program” world.
I can pretty much guarantee for you that Microsoft Word does not sit inside 9MB of memory. Maybe it only consumes 9MB per process, but that much code will never reside in 9MB of RAM….
OOo is largely in Java
No, the core code for Writer and Calc which is derived from StarOffice is in C++, Sun and the OOo people added some Java but the only part of OOo you require a JVM for is the new Database package. The OOo hackers seem to have added a lot of Python stuff and as I remember it a Python interpreter and most of the Python environment is bundled is the OOo package.
Taking 5 times as long as excel to work with this is quite respectable
Here I agree with you especially as if you have a spreadsheet file as big as 3.6M you ought to be using a more sophisticated application to handle the data.
“the only part of OOo you require a JVM for is the new Database package”
Incorrect. Java is required for: the media player; mail merge to email; Writer document wizards; accessibility tools; and much more. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Java_controversy for more details.
OpenOffice.org is bulky and slow enough, without requiring an entire virtual machine, language and libraries just for some fundamental features. There is a lot to be done…
Like a custom script
.
If you would like to guage the author of the article’s opinion, please read his other one-sided pieces [of shit.]
I have no doubt that MS Office is faster in many ways considering how few layers it has compared to OpenOffice.Org.
But it didn’t cost me $499.
Excel is FAR more advanced than Calc, but calc has seen significant improvement from 1.1.5 to 2.0 in terms of features and useability, specifically graphing.
though sort of off topic, I am a regular user of OO.o Impress for creating flowcharts and the difference between 1.1.5 and 2.0 is VERY LARGE and it is VERY easy to use now.
This is not like we’re talking of OO2 being slow in regard to MS Office 2.
No, we are talking about the latest version of OO compared with the latest version of MS Office. The version numbers don’t matter, these are the versions that directly compete against each other.
Besides, MS Office didn’t go 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, etc.
OO is 5 years old, sure MS Office is alot older, but then many of those years of development have been rendered irrelevant by the change in technology. Does the development on Office from 1990 till 1994 really have much positive impact of Office 12? I highly doubt it.
– Kelson
Raw numbers performance benchmarks like this one are useless for suites or productivity tools (it is like saying that Quake X is better than Unreal Y just because it has a few more fps than the other or vice-versa…)
A more interesting benchmark would be to measure the total time it would take for an average user to accomplish certain common tasks using different office suites.
Its not just a few fps. OpenOffice 3-4 times as much memory and CPU cycles.
Granted I have used Word and Excel much more than OpenOffice but I used OpenOffice exclusively for my MBA and I found Calc to be infuriating at times. I really wish I could use 1-2-3 style ‘/’ to access common functions. Charting on Calc was horrible. The ability to create sections in Word is superior as automatically inserting tables of contents.
OLE is also much better with MSOffice.
No it doesn’t.
Fact is, that if you calculate the combined resource usage of socalled system libs in windows and Office applications, the numbers get very different
However, the test made by the astroturfer George Ou (remember his last test?) shows that there are issues when converting from one format to another, especially in regard to wrong usage of the formats.
No sane person would do what George Ou did in these files.
I’d say that opening a file is a quite common task.
> A more interesting benchmark would be to measure the total time it would take for an average user to accomplish certain common tasks using different office suites.
OK, I’ll do just that. I will often read my work emails at home. I log on to the work VPN, and download my emails (via POP3) to my local PC. When I click on a Word attachment, it takes over a minute before the OO word processor displays the Word document.
Before I switched to OO on that PC, I had used MS Word ’97. That took less than 10 seconds before the document was displayed.
btw, Thunderbird (I know it isn’t OO, but situation is applicable) has a similar problem with start-up time. Why it takes an email client nearly a minute to start-up is beyond me. On the same PC I use Calypso and Mulberry, both start up in under 10 seconds.
The start-up times for OO applications are so slow that I could not recommend their use in an environment where “time is money.”
Which is just as useless, because your common tasks may be different than my common tasks.
Tho, creating and loading documents does seem to be a pretty common component of any task, as I can’t see how you could end up with a document w/o creating or loading it first.
Instead of everyone jumping on the anti-microsoft bandwagon and attacking the benchmarks, maybe they are correct and the OO folks just need to fix their create & load times.
– Kelson
> Which is just as useless, because your common tasks may be different than my common tasks.
Useless to you, but not useless to me. However, I do agree with the gist of your comment, and its implication that a great piece of software is a critical balance of features.
The Open Office team (and the Thunderbird team also) have some work to do. That is very apparent to me.
Who cares for RAM CPUs … it’s been decade now that we have CPU’s oversized because of crap softwares/Os from Microsoft … and surely Ms’ apps runs faster on windows and I hope they do it otherwise it would be funny …
Any fair benchmark should entail an application loading the same data in it’s own format as it was created by that application.
Try this.
Load his provided .sxc file into Openoffice.org 2.0. It will load slowly.
Select the block of data in the spreadsheet after it loads and copy it to the clipboard.
Open a clean openoffice.org spreadsheet and paste that data into it.
Save the new spreadsheet with the pasted data using the Openoffice native format (.ods).
Surprise!
On my lowly 2.4 P4 with 512mb memory, the save was now cut to only 12 seconds!
Closing all files and leaving the application open, I then tried loading the newly created .ods file cleanly.
It took 12 seconds.
Did I mention that the newly saved .ods file is only about 250k?
To show that I’m not bullshitting everyone, here is a link to the same exact data in .ods format taking up only 250k. This file (containing the same exact data as the original) loads much faster (12 seconds!) than Mr. Ou would have you believe possible with Oo.
http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=9355546
Mr. Ou’s article is useless.
Mr. Ou’s file contains more than 1 sheet. It contains about 10 sheets.
10*12 = 120 seconds
You have the idea, but my sample was 16 sheets. That makes it even worse.
The guy was fooling himself by using cut-paste to only replicate 1 sheet. All he needed to do was take my SXC file and do a “save as” to create a native ODS file. He didn’t even get the extention “ODS” right.
Ok, I downloaded your file, and tried it in my OOo.
Like I said earlier, I use version 1.1.5 and it took 22 seconds to open the file. CPU usuage was at 99% during the loading and for 3 seconds afterwards, then it dropped down to 23%.
I concur with you, the guy should have used native formats or open formats for both, as it just shows his results as skewed or that he is a shill.
Oh gee, its George Ou again and his pointless articles.
Seriously, does anyone time how fast something loads in
their day-to-day use of Office style apps? Does anyone
care? Aren’t they more in favour of price and
functionality?
Interesting comparison?…Hardly.
(I’m not trying to knock you down, Eugenia).
Why?
(1) Have a look at all George’s recent articles in
regards to “an alternative” vs Microsoft, notice a
pattern forming? Its not interesting…Its tiring.
(2) The pointless comparisons also apply to his “IE vs
Firefox” articles. He keeps defending it despite the
fact that virtually anyone with a technical background
knows to use anything other than IE is best for
security. Heck, he knows he can’t argue the fact that
user experience shows that using anything other than IE
is safer.
(3) He does what he can to be-little alternatives and
such. There was feedback from someone in Europe saying
that OpenOffice is sufficient for most users out there.
He did mention that being slightly slow, so George
picked at it and turned it around to favour him.
(4) From a ZDNet perspective, writing articles like
this brings in the advertising dollars. (Why do you
think Slashdot does it?)
(5) I suggest you try to replicate the results
yourselves. You’ll realise Mr Ou’s results and methods
of how he got them are very suspect.
(6) You’ll find that George manipulates the situation
to favour one over the other. (If you make an
experiment favour one over the other, then it isn’t
surprising when the results come out the same way!)
(7) If you provide a better detailed questioning in
feedback, George won’t argue…He knows he’s cornered.
So he’ll make some excuse or avoid you completely.
I try not to visit ZDNet for this very reason…
People like George Ou have there BS there.
So please, no more ZDNet based articles, OK?
Though I know it’s perhaps not accurate, but when loading up the native .ods version of Mr. Ou’s data, the memory in the task manager shows 52,252 KB which is considerably better than the 234,496 KB Mr. Ou shows with his .ods file directly loaded/converted from (and doubtless containing loads of cruft from) MS office.
Smitty,
Load the .ods file I gave a link to in my previou post (same data, but saved more cleanly) and then look at your memory usage with Oo.
I guarantee it’ll be less than 233mb.
Mr. Ou is full of shit.
I just did, and you’re right. I assumed that if it had an OO.o file type it was already converted, but it looks like OO.o tries to keep the data as intact as possible, converting it each time.
Hold on… Your document only has 1 sheet. Not 16 like Mr. Ou’s. If I multiply the new time out by 16, it still comes out faster, but only about 15-20%. And that may be due to rounding errors and the complexity of additional sheets.
Yup. You hit it. There is something to fix about the way people use Excel, and something to fix in regard to converting the formats.
George Ou’s example file does not resemble typical use of Excel.
Wow, I would have thought OOo would have done something about this very annoying limit.
Really sucks when using excel and you need more rows then this, say 250,000 rows, yet excel stops you at 64,000 and worse is graphing only goes to 32,000 rows. No fun having to break that up across multiple sheets and graphs.
And yes its easy to need that many rows, especially if your an engineer or someone analyzing/compiling data where someone wanted 10 hertz data for a test that runs for 3 days straight.
I’m guessing this is a limit of 32bit computing or something like that.
It’s a limit of whatever type is used to store the row/column number. In this case, a short is 16 bytes, which comes out to 64000 rows (unsigned) or 32000 (signed). I wouldn’t think it would be too difficult to change to an integer, but I bet a fair amount of code would need to be modified. And it could potentially skyrocket the memory requirements. I have no idea how often the row/column numbers are used, but if they are being used in any large arrays it could be a big difference.
haha
before complaining you should at least know that excel is not meant for such kind of usage. oh well…
Why when ever somebody say something bad about a Opensource product, a trillian zealots come out of no where and start bashing this guy?
People have thier own opinion!
And all he did was stated that it uses more memory and CPU resources. Doesn’t matter whether the time saving / openning are accurate or not. It is true!!
Get the facts right. OO uses more memory and CPU resource than MS office. And it is slightly slower.
But it is cross platform and free. So choose it yourself.
Now am i going be based by loads of zealots? Facts and facts. Although i still uses OO becoz i cant afford MS . And it will continue to improve in 2.x versions.
“Why when ever somebody say something bad about a Opensource product, a trillian zealots come out of no where and start bashing this guy?
People have thier own opinion!”
Dude, he’s misrepresenting facts to support an opinion. That’s just playing dirty.
I’m disappointed by the response from this thread. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly pro-open source and open formats, but the fact remains that OpenOffice.org’s performance is entirely unacceptable. Whichever way you cut it, the fact remains that at the end of the day, Microsoft Office outperforms it. You can scream until your blue about how it’s because OpenOffice.org uses it’s own widgets as opposed to native ones, but the fact remains the Microsoft Office still performs better and that is quite simply all that matters.
If OpenOffice.org want to be a contender, they have to address performance. I recently upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release, eager to see whether these issues had been rectified in 2.0. I came away sorely disappointed. OpenOffice.org seemed almost slower than before. The result is simply that I uninstalled it and replaced it with Abiword and Gnumeric, which fly on my machine (Sempron 2300+, 256MB RAM). You can expect Windows users to do the same and sadly they’re more likely to replace it with Microsoft’s offering.
We’ll see about it when the real facts get on the table. This article was pure BS from start to end.
However, it’s true that MS Office is faster (since most of it is being started beforehand, during system startup).
In regard to memory usage it’s difficult to say, since most people don’t count in the shared libraries of MS Office, but do count in the shared libraries of OpenOffice. Just like George Ou did.
His tests are completely flawed.
The only thing we can say, is: There are certain issues i OOoCalc around wrong usage of spreadsheets in Excel in regard to converting these to native Calc format.
That’s all we can use it to.
“However, it’s true that MS Office is faster (since most of it is being started beforehand, during system startup).”
No. MS Office starts up far, FAR faster under WINE on Linux. It leaves native OpenOffice.org in the dust. That’s with no preloading, no ‘Microsoft Magic’, no nothing. Just simply, sadly, better engineering and less inefficient, inelegant code.
OpenOffice.org is slower than MS Office for one reason: it’s not coded as well. And yes, that’s hard for some people to hear, and it does make you wonder just how powerful open source is when these problems come up (also see memory leaks and sluggishness in Firefox). But it’s a fact that the sooner we realise, and the sooner we focus on it, the sooner we can make something faster, sleeker, more elegant than MS Office.
No. MS Office starts up far, FAR faster under WINE on Linux. It leaves native OpenOffice.org in the dust. That’s with no preloading, no ‘Microsoft Magic’, no nothing. Just simply, sadly, better engineering and less inefficient, inelegant code.
There was a video on Channel 9 with Raymond Chen a while back. He talked about how to increase app start-up time. The gist of his argument was that, during start-up, the number of page faults has a huge influence on the speed. He said that you should profile your code, find the parts that are executed at start-up, and make sure that they are physically located next to each other in the compiled executable. When your app is loaded from the disk, caching will work better and it will dramatically improve the performance.
However, it’s true that MS Office is faster (since most of it is being started beforehand, during system startup).
Do the Crossover Office guys have access to this too? When I load Microsoft Office in Crossover Office it still loads a lot quicker than OO.org.
I bet if this article said that OO.org was benchmarking faster than MS Office you wouldn’t see a single comment saying that the test was flawed. It’s typical OSS response. Say something in favour of OSS and we’ll agree. Say something not in favour and we’ll come up with every excuse in the book. Don’t believe me, look at any comment thread when there’s a bug in Internet Explorer. Now look at a comment thread when there’s a bug in FireFox. You’ll see the same people that say Microsoft can’t code for IE, say that every piece of software has bugs when it’s a bug in FireFox.
If this test showed OOo was faster in loading on Windows than MS Office, I would definitely like to see how the benchmark tests were done, since it doesn’t fit with user experience at all.
So you’re negative comments about typical OSS response are not only offensive, but obviously wrong. Of course there are some stupid zealots here and there, but forget about them (we could say a lot about all the windows zealots, and the mac zealots, the gnome zealots and the kde zealots, the beos zealots and all the other zealots if we wanted to), and look at the facts.
Wine is for an instance faster than XP in certain areas and slower than XP in other areas.
But isn’t it funny, that benchmarks showing MS Office to be much faster and using much less memory always tend to use examples not likely to happen in reality? How come you can find so many flaws?
The sad part is that the test isn’t that bad – George Ou just draws the wrong conclusions. And that’s the real issue here.
The issues about bugs in IE vs. FF can be boiled down to the fact that in FF bugs get fixed must faster, and there are a lot fewer of them (including security holes according to Secunia). Many bugs in IE has been there for many years and are not likely to be fixed (at least not for a long while). The same goes for many other parts of Windows. Just look at scaling, or drag’n’drop. No fixes here since the first release of Windows4 (Windows95 and NT4).
But yes, you can of course find some who are blind in regard to flaws in open source software, just like there are people blind to flaws in proprietary software. See if you can navigate around them, even if it can be difficult.
You’re wrong. The memory stats are from the amount of memory used by the process. Doesn’t matter if it’s a system DLL or app DLL, if the process uses that DLL, it counts against the memory usage for the process.
It doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t count all processes in regard to MS Office apps
Another, separate comparison here (on OS X this time):
http://www.redlers.com/generalcomparison.html
Results show very similar to how any unbiased observer has seen — OpenOffice.org is incredibly slow and weighty. For all the rhetoric around it, it’s just a fact. I like and use OOo, but it is horridly bloated and inelegant. MS Office loads faster under WINE on Linux, for heaven’s sake!
It’s amazing to see years of people attacking “Microsoft bloatware”, and yet when OpenOffice.org and Firefox come along, both slower and heavier than their Microsoft equivalents (although better in places), everyone suddenly spins on a sixpence and says “Oh it doesn’t matter, buy more CPU and RAM…”
If it was the other round, everyone would be slating MS for these stats. But there is, sadly, double-standards in the community. Let’s stop putting our fingers in our ears, and start trying to make OOo lighter and faster.
The attached link is unusable. It’s only true in regard to mac-port.
The mac-port is known to be a lot worse than all other ports.
Let’s see another test, this time comparing apples with apples, on the right platform (in this case the windows platform), instead of claiming that results for Mac-ports are true also for Windows ports.
Having used OOo 1.1, and OOo 1.9.xxxx, I’m pretty psyched about how much less crappy 2 is. We did give Microsoft a hard time for a bloated Office suite, remember? Office XP. But, it was bloated for a different reason: It had so many features you didn’t care about you could hardly find the ones you wanted.
I’m not a big fan of OOo. But, I’d rather see people on a broken up bloated piece of FOSS than a bloated up broken piece of proprietary software. Why? Because 5 years ago Trident was what Trident is now. 5 years ago gecko barely worked, it’s really nice now. 5 yeard ago khtml was pathetic, it’s competitive today. I think in 5 years OOo will be vastly superior than it is today. The only reason Office has improved is because it’s 60% of the company’s income and they can’t afford to lose it…
I suppose we don’t yet know what happens to a FOSS project when it runs the market.
This is just confirming something I already know. I’m a big supporter of OOo but simply see it moving so slowly in development I’ve lost hope.
Not to mention it seems to clone a lot of stuff from MSO.
Talking about lightweight etc. GoBe Productive MmmmmM, it’s so horrid that they went down the drain. That was the production software I loved more than everything else. Soooo slick.
If not something dramatically changes I’ll keep using MSO for many many years to come, locking me to a platform I really dislike =(
I tried to copy and paste all his 16 sheets into a different spreadsheet and saved it again. It does seem like OpenOffice.org 2.0 has a performance problem with very large spreadsheets.
A wild, but quite reasonable guess is that OO.org uses an inefficient algorithm for appending to lists. The most obvious approach is often very inefficient. This is a problem that should be possible to fix.
Many GTK applications suffer from inefficient use of GTK list view, especially when sorting is required.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=101 via http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11857
Not 100% convinced that the numbers are valid, but on my machine, when I try to copy anything in OO.o (especially Calc; using Windows), it takes about 5+ seconds to make it to the clipboard. In that time between pressing Ctrl+C and it showing up, if I press Ctrl+V anywhere else, it just won’t paste. Five seconds later, it pastes (after repeated pasting).
OO.o is slow on Windows.
OO2 is out.
Maybe it’s time to use that d-someting wondertool and start profiling the beast a little bit?
It’s time to throw away openoffice , it’s bloated software and it will never be a real alternative to ms office . It will be better if all the effort will go to koffice and gnome office as they both have good base (anyone who looked in oo code know it’s a bad program)
numbers seem right
iP4-620 3.0Ghz, 2MB L2 cache, XP32+sp2, 1GB RAM
Opened with calc the file (3+min)
Saved in xls format.
Opened xls file with Calc – opened for 15 seconds! true Excel opened it for 3sec, but still – why use so DUMB file format if handling of big files is SO slow?!
Closed Excel, closed calc…
Guess what – soffice.bin is using 310MB RAM, VM size is 430MB
Opened the file, (usage went up to 400/520MB ), closed – down to 310/430 …
Compatibility is here, but some serious tweaking is needed… and personally, I’d prefer a closed source but FAST file format instead of this JOKE called .ods
The first step to clean up OOo is to rip out that stupid UI abstraction layer and implement a native GUI for each needed toolkit (Qt, Win32, Gtk, OSX). I can already hear the trolls shrieking “but it’s too much work!!!”. No pain, no gain. Same for Mozilla and Firefox. UI abstraction layers are garbage. K-Meleon I think already busted that and damn it’s f–king fast!
So, when are you starting to work on this project?
Huh, when you quit trying to sound smart maybe?
I think it might be more productive to just dump OOo and work on improving Koffice instead, this one was done right from the start. And guess what? When it will be ported to Qt 4, it’ll use even less memory.
OO is FREE ! wich means that if it takes more ram I DONT CARE becouse i have 350$ to buy 2Gb-3Gb of ram
( spended from MS office :+) ).
p.s. in this benchmark the memory wich MS office uses from a shared libraries , dlls and etc is not “added” , and the memory from the Swap.
May The Source Be With You!
Naiden Gochev,Bulgaria
So sue me. People also have very, very few spreadsheets that are of an extremely large size running to many pages and thousands tens of thousands of rows. They just want to get general work done. The only spreadsheets that are that size tend to be autogenerated, and as such, the data probably shouldn’t be in a spreadsheet at all. Open Office free and it handles all my spreadsheets within a pretty reasonable amount of time. Can’t say more than that.
This just seems to be an article, not just directed at Open Office, but at the Open Document Format as a bad, slow, memory hogging standard file format. I can’t think why. I also wonder why he points to an SXC file and not an ODF one. Does anybody reckon he’s getting paid for this?
Gnumeric loaded that file in 29 seconds on my computer, thats about three times as fast as OO.o. We have known that MSOffice is faster and lighter, so what do you expect for £200 and one of the best, richest acclaimed software developers in the world?
The point being, is it worth paying out so much money on MSoffice for something thats slower but does the job like OO.o.
“so what do you expect for £200 and one of the best, richest acclaimed software developers in the world?”
So that’s it? I remember when free software used to be about so much more — the power of open source coding. Now, with bloated, buggy and security-hole-prone open source apps in the limelight, we’re just back to price, it seems!
I find those results strange.
Where are the files used for the test so we can check ?
I do open some pretty big Excel and PowerPoint files and use them from Open Office 2. I usually convert to OO native format then use files.
I have not seen any change in speed from previous to 2.0 version of Open Office. And especially not such huge values this person gets.
The first step is to check and have several people reproduce results. And since I don’t get those I am highly suspicious of those.
([email protected])
I can still quite vividly remember that Office 6 on Windows 3.11 was fast on a 486 with 8mb RAM. So the excuse of 12 versions is lame.
I still think it’s apples and oranges comparission, it’s like comparing The GIMP with Photoshop for filter rendering speed. It’s just no right since OSS is free and every benchmark or comparission show the price vs performance.
I think this is a very unfair and baised artical, tipical OSnews one at that.
In an office of 12 users working in nothing but OO2 all day, not one of them has complained about speed or features. They do however think it amazing that such a great product comes with no strings attached. All this speed, ram, cpu crap comes from loonies with nothing better to do than argue shit. The same shit can be heard at the local street drags with more loonies arguing Fords are faster than Holdens, Chevies for you American folks!
I agree with you, these kinds of tests are rather irrelevant. No sane user do things like this, if you
have this much data a relational database would be a much better choice.
However, OOo also target windows users and they are not used to having access to such tools. Until resently they couldn’t just download postgresql and do some quick stored procedures.
To them, such functionality came at the price of a MS-SQL server license. Because of this, it’s no wonder that they have strange user behavior, and naturally they try to transfer such behavior to OOo if they decide to switch office suit.
Learning to do it the right way will be much more costly to them than just continue using Microsoft products. So if OOo wants to compete it got to be faster even at this kind of extreme usage.
Damn right! We only want facts if they favor open source.
Stuff is getting slower. Koffice 1.4 is horrifically slower than Koffice 1.3 at some tasks. In the process of developing the Privateer Remake I almost every day open up a csv representing the stats for all the ships and installations. It’s rather large, and takes a bit of time. With Kspread 1.3, there was a bit of a delay. With 1.4, I have to tell it to load, then leave the room for a while.
I noticed it when I compiled 1.4 from source to check out Krita (debian was being slow as usual). Loading up units.csv was like molasses. Figured it might have been something I did, but when Debian finally put out packages, they were no better.
It’s really almost unusable, for a file that’s only 319kb. Only takes 2 seconds to open in Kwrite vs (/me times it) **OMFG**
2 seconds after clicking the window is up. 50 seconds after that I get the import dialog where I tell it that yes, commas are the separating value. 250 seconds after that it’s loaded. Grand total of 5 minutes to load the damn file. (/me lights kspread on fire) I thought a minute or so with 1.3 was bad..
Man that hurts. Here’s the file if anyone wants to check it out:
-MamiyaOtaru http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wcuniverse/priv/un…
This article is completely flawed and biased. However, how can you expect anything but strong bias from someone like George Ou. There are still folks out there who make a living from attacking OSS.
This test isn’t even a test.
It’s a funny attempt at flaming, but the fact is that his file contains almost 300Mbyte of data, which doesn’t represent real-world content in any way.
Most of the content of his file is pure garbage, no wonder OpenOffice is chewing on it
Memory Foot Print is miscalculated. Since MS Office libraries is loaded during startup memory foot print of ms office is much higher than what is stated in the article.
It’s embarrasingly obvious for anyone.
Look at how he calculate the memory usage.
For all OO-applications he reports soffice.bin and soffice.exe (he reports all resources, incl. shared resources) while for MS Office he only reports the app-specific resources, and does not report the usage for shared resources.
He’s actually making different test on different applications, using different calculations on the testresults, and claim that they are comparable…
This is pure Rob Menderle
I got somewhat curious as to how a properly prepared native OOo2 document would perform.
The machine I was testing on is an oldish laptop:
Ubuntu Breezy Badger
Mobile Athlon 1600 (1400MHz)
RAM: 726MB (rest used for onboard graphics)
Slow HDD (4.200RPM)
1GB swap partition
What I did was saving each of the 16 worksheets from Mr. Ou’s .sxc document to .csv format to make sure there won’t be any MS cruft left in the documents. Each worksheet contains 16.282 rows of data (total: 260.512). I never understood the necessity of managing 260.512 rows of data in a spreadsheet, it’s clearly a case for using proper databases. Somehow, databases other than Access seem to scare the wits out of SMB managers though.
Anyways: I opened the .csv files (each weighing a hefty 1.2MB) in OOo2 calc, the complete process went reasonably fast (3 to 4 seconds for each .csv file). Saving the complete spreadsheet in its native .ods format however took a whopping 7:30 minutes! Granted, a total of 260.512 rows of data easily qualifies as monster spreadsheet that you won’t encounter in the wild very often. It does happen occasionally, though.
Opening the newly created .ods file after a reboot took 5:30 minutes. On my desktop pc, the same file loads in 3:15. I talked to a client the other day, he complained about the slowliness of his company laptop. It features a P3 processor and 256MB of RAM. I agree it is a shame that he has to work with such ancient equipment but that’s what many companies still use since it is working for them, sort of. Guess how much fun he’d have with this monster sheet and OOo2.
IT IS A FACT, the weakest point of openoffice is its poor performance! We have to accept that if we want the survival of ooffice and try improve the code!!
I think people who tried openoffice in teh past but continued using MSoffice did that for :
1) performance reasons (get me wrong but I would estimate a 60% on that)
2)compatibility with MSoffice (i would put 35% and hapilly this can be resolved by the introduction of the OASIS format and the development of a plugin for MSoffice) and
3) only 5% for features, where the suite performs with excelency (maybe macros?)!
I think why i reply to this thread is no longer becoz of the love of Oo or so so…….
It is becoz George Ou!!. I don’t know him. I haven’t read his blog before. So i dont know what he does and if he is a bias bloke or not.
But all i see is that he point out a FACT!. And could people stop arguing?? Oo uses more memory and CPU resources. ( For the time saving and opening time etc are pretty subjective and can’t really measure in any accuracy )
But if you ask the general public most if not all would think OO is slower ( Under window ) . Another FACT!
Ok. some point out MS office has some unfair advantage because some lib/module are already preloaded with windows. Yeah i know that…..that is just part of Cross platform isn it?
so why shouting out George Ou? Can’t these people just ADMIT it is slow. And work on it to prove them they CAN DO IT!
You can make anything look like a FACT and probably fairly easily design a benchmark that proves the opposite. No, I am not a zealot but if you haven’t read anything from ZDNet’s George Ou before perhaps you might want to get familiar with his style and see for yourself how “neutral” he is when it comes to anything open source.
1. At the moment Microsoft Office is superior to OpenOffice. That’s right OO fans, your baby is inferior, performance-wise and in most other ways. Its one redeeming quality is zero cost. Sorry this truth hits you right in the gonads, thus bringing your manhood into question. Face it like a man, or better yet, find something else into which to invest your emotions.
2. Despite all the facts in the world staring at them in the face, assorted Linux / Open Source dorks who don’t know logic from hot rocks will continue to deny reality. If you want conclusive proof that high IQ does not always translate to real-world abilities and sensibilities, this is it right here.
There are roughly two kinds of men. The jocks, who have a heavy emotional investment in sports teams; the nerds, who cling to certain aspects of technology with an identification that verges on the sexual. The latter are the ones who get all offended by any comparisons unfavorable to their pet hardware or software. You see plenty of them in this thread. Although they like to consider themselves mentally superior to the jocks, in reality they suffer from the same sort of stinking stupidity.
And that’s the bottom line. Sorry for yet another body blow to your fragile ego Linux dorks. Get used to it or perhaps switch to a different hobby.
See the following URL for a speed and memory usage comparison of AbiWord, OOWriter, and MS Word.
http://www.geocities.com/typopl/bug5291.html#2005Oct3
But isn’t it funny, that benchmarks showing MS Office to be much faster and using much less memory always tend to use examples not likely to happen in reality? How come you can find so many flaws?
How about you come up with an example where OO is faster and use less memory by x factor?
Jeezus, people! I’m a super big fan of OpenSource but it is still software and may not all be perfect! Benchmark, testing, criticism are all good and should be welcomed.
Ou’s evaluation seems to be pretty factual and none of the posts here are convincing me of otherwise, especially as I have first hand experience a) using it b) trying to compile the damn beast on Debian.
System: Pentium III-450 196MB Toshiba laptop
OS: Windows XP
I started OOo Calc (takes a while). Then I tested the time for various file opening operations.
Test 1. Opened my biggest spreadsheet, a 500kB excel single page spreadsheet (.xls). Time: 7sec
Saved the document as OOo spreadsheet (.ods) and now it’s only 61kB (a lot smaller).
Test 2. Opened the new OOo spreadsheet. Time: 13sec
Test 3. Opened a 60kB excel spreadsheet that has 5 pages with one chart embedded on each page. Time: 20sec
Saved as .ods and now it’s 190kB (a lot bigger!!??).
Test 4. Opened the .ods spreadsheet. Time: 28sec
Memory usage never seemed excessive.
I’m sure that Excel is faster.
I can live with the old laptop and the same goes for OOo.
Thanks for the free s/w.
Everytime I read this type of topic I feel pity, cause startup time say 15 sec extra.. will never matter me, as I spend hours infront of computer and my objective of using office suit is to write docs and not measure startup time.
Do not ignore the openoffice startup time just because its free! Ignore it because its writen in different way, and to match all the operating system they have to compromise on something. Today on Windows OS you have Openoffice, tomorrow on MAC & Linux you can still use the same Openoffice without involving the learning time! Consider that.
No amount of petty excuses from the OSS nazis will save for the facts that:
* OOo has poor algorithms
* An UI abstraction layer
* Uses JAVA for some commonly used features
The fact that Office loads much faster even on WINE prooves how utterly ridiculous are the claims of MS conspiracies to have Office preloaded. That fact is it has always been fast since the beginning.
you are simple and ignorant.
I’ve used OO and MS Office side by side and can TRULY tell you that OO is faster in 99% of all common uses without a doubt.
Just because someone says that OO is slower and they publish an article claiming this doesn’t make it true.
Don’t be cattle. Don’t be lead around by your balls! Do your own research. Try them both.
OO is changing things for the better and anyone else that says otherwise is afraid or a paid MS shill.
FREEdom