Is OpenOffice.org getting faster? - OpenOffice.org Ninja
Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next?
We need a good benchmark to produce good data, but what do we measure? Let's assume the most common operations are starting OpenOffice.org, opening a Writer document, scrolling from top to bottom using the down arrow, exporting the document, and closing both the document and OpenOffice.org.
This benchmark automatically performs these 5 operations while taking precise measurements. The tests are repeated because of inevitable noise in the results. The benchmark performs 10 passes where each pass begins with a reboot to test cold start performance. Cold starts are slower because hard drive information is not in cache memory. Each pass consists of 10 iterations, of which most iterations measure warm start performance. Warm starts are faster because the operating system has cached the hard drive information in memory. You may notice OpenOffice.org is faster the second time you open it. In this benchmark, testing each version of OpenOffice.org yields 500 measurements. With 11 versions, that is 5500 measurements.
The specific Writer document tested is the ODF_text_reference_v1_1.odt. All tests are done against unmodified vanilla builds from the OpenOffice.org web site.
