Re: [tdf-discuss] OpenOffice.org articles in Linux Format March 2011

At 8:37pm -0500 Fri, 11 Feb 2011, Graham Lauder wrote:
> On Saturday 12 February 2011 09:35:59 Kevin Hunter wrote:
> > Because they don't know how to eloquently say that the quickstarter
> > is a no-go. The name "quickstarter" is a misnomer. It should be
> > "preloader", because that's what it actually does. (But that
> > doesn't sound as sexy, I know.) How the quickstarter works is have
> > use gobs of memory effectively sitting idle. That doesn't work.
> > Many of us in the computing, engineering, physics, and chemical
> > fields *use* our computational resources.
>
> Start up time is down to the the OS.

I disagree.  More on that below ...

> I used to think the same as you. However this is what I have found.
> Start up on Ubuntu Gnome box is slow, slower than XP startup.
> OpenSuSE KDE4 box again slowish but like the others not gruesomely
> slow. But on my Yoper KDE4 box ,cold start up is almost instant and
> certainly faster than MSO on XPSP2. Yoper is a distro optimised for
> speed so obviously the problem is not all in the OOo/LibO code

In a mathematical sense of "all" I already believe it is not entirely 
the fault of OOo/LO.  However, I need more information before I will 
accept this particular bit of anecdotal evidence.  For starters, /how/ 
did the Yoper folks get such an increase in speed for OOo?  Why have I 
-- so far -- been unable to recreate these results on my own machines 
(which range from old to fairly new, and run a variety of distros)?

To be clear, I'm not denying that I may be wrong or have out-dated 
information, but at the very least I'm surprised I haven't seen a blog 
or other such advertisement of how they did it.  I would think it a 
matter of pride for whoever pulls it off, others would want to know, and 
I consider myself fairly well informed.

> > The short answer is that the quickstarter doesn't count: I want it to
> > load as fast or faster than MSO /without/ the quickstarter.  MSO can do
> > it, from a cold boot, fast.  Why can't LO?
>
> MSO has a quickstarter in it's integration with the OS. Compare the
> speed of MSO opening in Windows environment as opposed to Apple and
> Apple has a very fast GUI

I *hate* using MSO on Mac because it is so egregiously slow (even after 
loading is "finished"!).  However, I'm not convinced that it's not 
"just" an issue with MS libraries.  Reference this article about Windows 
Firefox being faster than Linux Firefox, as run through Wine:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox

We're a full two years later at this point, I may have missed an 
intervening few test updates, and things may have improved in this 
particular case, but the point is that it's not a "simple" matter of OS 
integration.

I think OS integration is a red herring, and I would claim a poor tactic 
for the LO community to maintain: "You're only faster because you've 
better OS integration."  More honest, I think, is "You're right, we 
don't start as fast; but give us time, we're working on it."  And, if 
you're following the devel list, we are.

Cheers,

Kevin

--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***