Interview with OOo programmer Michael Meeks

[AndrewZ]

This is a FOSDEM (open source conference) interview with Novel-paid OOo developer Michael Meeks. He talks about performance among other things, and some of it is technical.

http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/interviews/interviews_meeks

[DanK]

I saw that article and thought wow, if open office started faster that'd cure my biggest issue with it right now, so I rush off to get a copy of rc4 figuring that I could at least test and see if there was much difference, and well, there doesn't seem to be, were these optimizations for linux specific issues or simply just aren't in yet? I'm looking at 30 second startup times on a Pentium 4 CPU 2.53GHz (504 mb of ram... one of those shares ram with the vid card setups) and while it's by no means a power house computer, my home computer that IS a powerhouse takes a long time to startup (though I've never timed it... it's probably around 5 seconds but might even be as high as 20). The second time I use writer or any other open office program is generally pretty instant, but that first time is absolutely killer (or any other time when open office gets swapped out of memory) even with the use of quickstarter.

[AndrewZ]

I think he's still working on most of the problems, and the release notes show only one performance improvement in 2.0.2:

http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.0.2rc4.html

[zero0w]

Another interview with Michael Meeks by the Linux Format Magazine, excellent material:

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=18