[NBLUG/talk] Re: slow open office startup

[Kyle Rankin]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:29:10PM -0800, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 November 2005 06:05 pm, Tim Preston wrote:
> > So, can anyone explain this in OO's progamming? Is it loading stuff, or
> > creating temp files? Couldn't there be a file or group of files that
> > already exist that OO uses to startup? Or, is it just recreating the
> > files everytime it starts that slows it down?
> 
> I've heard that the inner workings of OpenOffice are rather difficult to 
> understand because most of the function and variable names in the source code 
> are mostly in German (the original StarOffice was written by a German 
> company).  I've also heard complaints about how StarOffice/OpenOffice tries 
> to be a single application that does everything; that would seem to 
> contribute to its slow startup time.

Splitting up the application into smaller parts wouldn't necessarily
improve performance any--look at Firefox. That was at least one of the
driving forces behind splitting it from Mozilla proper, yet when they split
it off, Mozilla actually loaded and performed faster.

> 
> I have to say, though, that every new release of OpenOffice has seemed FASTER 
> to me, not slower.  The codebase that they started with was really bloated 
> and inefficient, but it seems to be improving.
> 

I would have to agree that they do seem to at least be trying to address
the speed issue (I imagine it's their number 1 complaint) with each
release. I suppose they could look into doing under Linux what's so popular
to do under Windows these days--just load everything into RAM when the
system starts to mask the slow startup time.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org