OpenOffice.Org is *slow* to load

Lemma · Posted: Wed Nov 20, 2002 6:55 am Post subject: OpenOffice.Org is *slow* to load

Hi.
I have an P4-M@1.7GHz/512MB DDR and OpenOffice.org takes some 2-3 min to load!?! This is on an Dell Inspiron Laptop 4150 (not that it should matter ;-)

) and I *need* that office-suite, gnumeric with abiword just does not cut it...

In the beginning OO.org loaded in just a few secounds (3-5) but a few days ago it went from slow to *very* slow (I consider 5 sec to load slow ;-)

), and I can not say that I know what I did (*if* I did anything at all...). It all start with a lot of HDD-activity a few secs but then nothing - until the program pops up. Suggestions? I am lost here :-(

/Lemma
_________________
Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Think of it as a gigatic Java program... Lots of garbage collecting, object creation and object casting. GCJ perhaps? That may not help, considering that there apppears to be many native code libraries.

daba5443 · Guest

Sure, a *huge* java-program, but >1 min just to load? It can not be right!
/Lemma

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Actually, I have a 1.5GHz 256 RDRAM (Rambus) 768 Swap 40GB 7200rpm HDD, and it takes just under a minute to load. Then again, I also compiled j2sdk from scratch, and an optimized VM can mean something. I always have setiathome running in the background, maybe that prevents the system from going too idle...

Maybe it is the mobile processor or laptop HDD causing the problem.

Consider increasing the HDD -> RAM cache. Since the laptop sounds quite fast, recompiling and reinstalling may be an option.

Lemma · Posted: Wed Nov 20, 2002 2:36 pm Post subject:

I am compiling the java-VM as I write this - I do hope it does matter (it should atleast make it possible to use java under phoeninx :-)

). When I get time, I will compile OO.org with gcc 3.2 (and suitible flags) to get an even larger speed boost. At least I hope it does... I still consider it a *long* time to have to wait over some 5 sec for *any* app to load (well, in some cases I could possible tolerate 10s).
/Lemma
_________________
Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

Lockup · Guru Joined: 25 Jul 2002 Posts: 430

erm i have a p3 450 and it takes 10 secs to load...heh *tongue*

Lemma · Posted: Wed Nov 20, 2002 4:30 pm Post subject:

Hm, yeah, the splashscreen pops up within a sec or so, the hdd is spinning a while (5 sec or so) and then - nothing over a period over 2-3 min and *then* it it useble... Strange, like if it is looking for something that times out...
/Lemma
_________________
Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

LaSAR · Posted: Wed Nov 20, 2002 5:23 pm Post subject:

~ 30s on a athlon classic 700 , 256 MB RAM, i'd like it to start faster also

does the VM youre running matters? i am using BlackDown ..
ive read about a 'OOo quicklauncher' for kde being developed (comparable to the quicklauncher for OOo in windows). how about that, any experiences?

AlterEgo · Veteran Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 1619

It's called OOOQS
and it works well, that is: OOo starts in a few seconds. The price however is, that you lose some 30 or so megs of memory, and some time @ boot.

I never had any real problems with it.

LaSAR · Posted: Wed Nov 20, 2002 7:16 pm Post subject:

thanx! and anyone knows if there's a big difference between using Blackdown or Sun's SDK?

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Everyone always says:

IBM or Sun's Java VM tends to be faster

One day, someone will say,

A optimized build-from-source Java VM + Jikes must be faster than precompiled binaries.

Problem is that there are no production quality from source Java VMs and matching compilers.

lx · Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2002 12:36 pm Post subject:

I have sun-j2sdk compiled from scratch and oo compiled from scratch and starting oo for the first time takes,....... well I will measure it now,...... 23 seconds, on a athlon-xp 2000, looking at my proc applet (not very accurat), there's a very short 10% processor use then a long time 10 secs or something nothing, in between splash is shown, then the processor peaks out for some seconds, then almost nothing and then suddenly average use and then nothing and suddenly oowriter pops up, finally, if I start it now it's < 2 seconds. Hope they fix this in the next release, if up it's a good tool, but it very memory hungry (around 80mb), well I would use it if I wasn't already using Emacs + Latex. ;-)

Cya lX.
_________________
"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.", Frank Zappa