OpenOffice.org Bloatware?

[Justin Dugger]

Usually I subscribe to the philosophy of "what goes on in slashdot
stays in slashdot." But since we had an interesting discussion in the
irc channel reguarding RAM and kernel configurables, I suppose I can
use this as a jumping board for further discussion.

Frankly, OO.o suffers the same amount of salesmanship when presented
by OSS advocates as any other piece of software.  And a threatening
blog post won't effectively change anything about it, even when given
high visibility via slashdot.  Partly, you need the will to change,
not just the will to criticize.  Bootchart.org is a good example. 
Someone suspected that Linux boot time was bad and put forth a
challenge to the general public to cobble together a tool to
graphically represent the boot process. The result was a tool easily
adopted for various distributions, and across the board competition
among distros to eliminate obvious bottlenecks.  This cases feels
related; both need some metrics and visualization before significant
improvements can be made.  In neither OO.o nor boot time has vocal
dissatisfaction with Free software measurably improved things.

But on to the interesting bit. Given that we have copious amounts of
RAM these days, and long uptimes, many people like to work around the
problem of OO.o and other memory hogs by simply buying tons of memory
and leaving the apps open at all times.  They reason that with enough
RAM VM shouldn't swap out their programs, even though they don't use
them often.  The frequent foil to this however, is the dreaded disk
intensive cron job.  A hungry updatedb process can easily chew through
disk cache and scare an unused OO.o out of RAM in the quest for more
cache. The result is a ponderous computer when you wake up in the
morning or after any disk intensive activity.

One solution, that a fellow LUG'er found useful was the kernel's
swappiness setting. This parameter affects a kernel's desire to swap
things out.  People who utterly despise swap might consider setting
swappinnes to zero.  The maintainer has previously suggested on lkml
that he runs his desktop at 100. I've decided to try it out,  with no
serious consequences so far, but no really noticable benefits either.

jldugger

On 10/27/05, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Saw this on /.
>
> http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/27/1425232.shtml?tid=185
>
> After spending an entire ITEC exposition extolling the
> virtues of OOo, this crops up to claim that OOo has
> memory usage issues and very slow startup times.
>
> I'll admit that I haven't used M$ Office all that
> much, but I don't seem to notice a significant time
> period between running OOo and starting to write a
> document or create a spreadsheet.
>
> Has anyone else who uses both noticed the kind of lag
> on OOo that the article author describes?
>
> The Slashdot replies also go into the point that most
> people have M$ Office already, legally or illegally,
> so we can't talk "free" without running up against all
> the illegal copies out there which were also,
> technically, "free".
>
> One Slashdot reply says that Longhorn will make the
> "free" case for OOo by preventing people from running
> illegal copies of M$ software.  Does anyone know about
> this in more detail?
>
>
>
>
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