OO 1.1 timings, Linux and XP

[ouiouiliouinqui]

I did some timings with OpenOffice 1.1 and am puzzled by the results.

The first time after installing OO on Red Hat Linux 9, it took 58 seconds for the text editor to initialize and be ready for input. I closed the window and started it again and it took 38 seconds.

I have a multiple-boot system, with XP on the same machine. After installing OO 1.1 on XP, the text editor started up the first time in 16 seconds, and 6 seconds the second time.

Then I remembered that Microsoft Office puts something in the startup directory, so I checked and OO adds a program called "quickstart" to startup. So I removed quickstart from the startup directory, rebooted, and the OO text editor still took 18 and 8 seconds to initialize. I poked around a little bit and discovered that quickstart had been placed in a system prefetch directory. I had previously noticed after booting, but before starting the OO text editor the first time, the main OO executable soffice.exe was already shown as active in the task manager; I found it was also in prefetch. I deleted both quickstart and soffice from prefetch, rebooted and tried again. The text editor started up in 12 and 6 seconds.

At first I was puzzled that OO took so much longer to initialize on Linux. Then I thought, it could probably be remedied by simply writing a Linux counterpart to the quickstart module supplied with OO on XP. Now I am mystified by the way quickstart seems to make no difference on XP.

I looked at this OO forum and noticed something about fonts requiring some startup time. I copied the four Times New Roman files over to Linux and installed them in X. I started up OO, went to options, and set all the default fonts for text documents to Times New Roman. I rebooted, and OO started up in 46 seconds first time (this number is smaller than before, but it's first time after reboot, compared to first time after install), 35 seconds second time. Still significantly slower than on XP.

So if anyone has any thoughts to share, either about why OO takes longer to initialize on Linux than on XP, or why quickstart on XP seems to have no effect...

Thanks,
Bill

[The Liquidator]

My Timings, Mandrake 10, KDE 3.2, Duron 700 laptop with 384 Mb Ram. OOo1.1.1

Click on desktop icon - 15 seconds to get open pane
Load New text document - 3.5 seconds from selection.

I would point out that the whole install is in the user file. Don't know whether that makes a difference. I also run it on the same machine in Win 98. Startup times seem much slower.

Ian

[ouiouiliouinqui]

I posted a variant of my timings data at comp.os.linux.misc, and James McIninch replied that a Linux version of quickstart is available at ooqstart.sourceforge.net.