Does OpenOffice have an unfair notoriety as a performance hog?

The OpenOffice.org Suite is an adequate office suite for many people. However, it has been dogged by the accusations of performance bloat. Some studies have found that it was slower and had a worse performance than MS Office. However, some of these studies have been done on a spreadsheet of unnaturally large size. Comparisons of the Word processing components also have been missing. I have shown in my previous articles that Writer (the Word Processor of Open Office) is faster at loading files than Microsoft Word2007. Calc (the spreadsheet component of OpenOffice) is also faster than Microsoft Excel2007 in opening files in certain conditions. In the light of these findings, is it fair to consider Open Office a performance hog?

To further study the relative performance of MS Office 2007 and OpenOffice 2.3, I used Sysinternals Process Explorer and made a detailed analysis of how much processor and memory resources the Office applications were using in opening equivalent files in their own native format. For opening documents, was found that Writer was uniformly more resource efficient than Microsoft Word 2007.

For opening spreadsheets, at the initial startup and for large files, Microsoft Excel 2007 was more resource efficient than Open Office Calc. For small to moderately large files (at sizes having most real world use), the resource consumption of both OpenOffice.org Calc and Microsoft Excel were very close, with Calc having the slight upper hand in processor and memory resources. For extremely large files like those provided by George Ou, Excel substantially outperforms Calc in all respects(total time 23 vs 68secs, and memory consumption, Page faults 24.8K vs 42.8 K).

For handling presentations, while Microsoft Office had the better performance in initial startup of blank presentations, when actual presentations were being loaded, OpenOffice.org Impress had the upper hand over Microsoft Powerpoint. The results are given in the chart below. Further details are given at the bottom.

Therefore, if the Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation components are all considered, OpenOffice.org Office suite actually enjoys a slight performance advantage over Microsoft Office(much better in Word processing, slightly lesser in Spreadsheets, better in presentations). It is therefore surprising as to why OpenOffice is seen as bloated and a performance hog, while Microsoft Office is not. In fact, both are quite efficient programs in most real world situations, and the choice between them has to be made on a price/Feature comparison. While it is true that Open Office Calc is slow at loading gigornomous spreadsheets, Microsoft Word also has issues with large documents. In fact, I think Microsoft Word in handling large documents is a worse resource hog than OpenOffice Calc is in handling enormous spreadsheets, but I will leave that for a separate post. Therefore, do not fall for the statement that OpenOffice.org is more bloated. Those statements either stem from ignorance or are FUD. Both are dangerous.

	Kernel Time	User Time	Total Time
writer startup	1.98	1.16	3.14
word startup	1.31	2.23	3.55
writer small file	0.5	2.67	3.17
word small file	0.58	3.5	4.08
writer large file	1.09	58.2	59.3
word large file	9.23	33min18.7s	33min27.9s
Calc Startup	1.09	1.09	2.19
Excel Startup	0.23	0.3	0.53
Calc Small File	0.5	2.02	2.52
Excel small file	0.72	3	3.72
Calc Large File	0.55	4.86	5.41
Excel Large File	0.69	3.53	4.22
Impress Startup	1.44	1.34	2.78
Powerpoint startup	0.39	0.56	0.95
Impress file	0.7	2.58	3.28
Powerpoint file	0.88	3.53	4.41
Impress Large file	0.86	5.75	6.61
Powerpoint Large File	1.81	13.72	15.53

Table 1: Showing the time taken by OOo and MSOffice completely open the test files. For details of the different files, see below Table 2.

	Pr M (K)	Peak Pr M (K)	Page faults	Ph M (K)	Peak Ph M (K)
writer startup	24788	24792	16918	46468	47424
word startup	53196	55404	27860	63668	65864
writer small file	31148	31184	16445	54480	54480
word small file	56312	56324	21518	81100	81100
writer large file	51588	51620	23822	74720	74728
word large file	65040	69812	50830	92952	94704
Calc Startup	23228	23236	12408	44084	44084
Excel Startup	9472	9472	3903	14576	14576
Calc Small File	31542	31550	16367	53908	53912
Excel small file	52608	52608	16593	62452	62452
Calc Large File	35500	35508	18060	57984	57988
Excel Large File	52944	53020	17985	64288	64288
Impress Startup	30488	30496	17412	51960	52684
Powerpoint startup	8676	10468	7135	17180	18728
Impress file	35228	35900	22366	61196	61516
Powerpoint file	59372	60908	21533	74260	75656
Impress Large file	39496	40064	24439	70064	70352
Powerpoint Large File	90120	90120	34888	104984	104984

Table 2: Showing Memory performance of OOo and MS Office

Explanation and details:

Startup: Initial Startup after boot

Word and Writer Small File: A 30 pg document in .docx and .odt formats.

Word and Writer Large File: A 1200 pg document in .docx and .odt formats.

Excel and Calc Small File: This was a workbook having three sheets, each sheet having 256 rows and 13 columns written. (in .xlsx and .ods formats)

Excel and Calc Large file: A workbook having three sheets, but having 4096 rows and 13 columns written on each spreadsheet. The first 256 rows of the small file were copied and pasted 16 times in succession.(in .xlsx and .ods formats)

Impress and Powerpoint File: A 37 slide presentation taken from the internet http://depts.washington.edu/pccm/DIC.ppt

Impress and Powerpoint Large File: The 37 slides from the above presentation copied and pasted 3 times in the same file to make it a 148 slide presentation. (The presentation file was changed to .odp and .pptx)

Abbreviation: Pr M: Private Memory; Ph M : Physical memory; K: 1000 (the figures for the memory are bytes x 1000)