My biggest complaint that I have when using Open Office is the speed of the application. It loads terribly slow for instance and it only topped by the time GIMP needs to startup. Way to slow to edit a document quickly in my opinion. The guys at Zolved found a way to speed up Open Office by editing a few settings in the software’s settings.
I was a bit skeptical at first but soon found out that the changes would indeed speed up Open Office tremendously. Start Open Office and click on Tools > Options. This should open the configuration. Click on Memory in the left menu and change the following settings:
- Number of Steps: 30
- Use for Open Office: 128
- Memory per Object: 20
- Number of Objects: 20
Click on Java in the left menu afterwards and uncheck Use a Java Runtime Environment. Click OK and restart Open Office to see how fast it is now. That’s really a difference.
Update: Recent versions of the popular Office suite show improved loading times. The tweaks outlined above are still valid on the other hand, especially the bit about removing the Java Runtime Environment from the Office suite to speed up the load time. That is, of course, only an option if Java is not needed in the Office suite.
Another possible option is to move the Open Office installation to a faster drive. Moving it from a conventional hard drive to a Solid State Drive can improve the loading times of the Office software by a lot.
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Wow!
That really is a huge difference.This was a big reason I wasn’t using OO.
Thanks.
Gee Wow Thanks!
thanks!!
Wow, I was looking for something like that for years literally. OO is starting faster than Word now… Thanks!
WOW. Like Daniel & Joe posted, i was looking for this speed up for years and was the main reason why i persisted with M$ Office. Thx so much for this.
it seems to work for NeoOffice on Mac OS X as well!
Since we started using the Open Office Quickstarter (something I would not do with Microsoft products) our speed problems have decreased markedly. I manage some 1,000 installations, so this is significant for us…
Karl A. Krogmann
I’m afraid nobody here realized that there always will be a big difference between OO run for the first time after boot and consequential runs. The main reason for this is the fact that the OO binary and data are wery likely to stay cached in you operating memory. In my case OO almost doesn’t touch my hard disk during consequential startups.
I’ve of course tried your settings and measured beaviour for a while but there was NO difference in starting times of Writer (I didn’t measured other parts of OO). After boot it took 12 seconds to start it and all consequential startups took 6 secs. Both with old and new settings. Maybe one important fact is that I don’t have Java installed for OO.
Yes! This was the answer… I suspect most was caused by the Java on my machine. I was waiting 30+ sec to get the program opened. Wow, does that seem like forever when the boss is hovering over you waiting for an answer that is contained in a spreadsheet…
Quote from Ivo Pavlik:
I’m afraid nobody here realized that there always will be a big difference between OO run for the first time after boot and consequential runs. The main reason for this is the fact that the OO binary and data are wery likely to stay cached in you operating memory. In my case OO almost doesn’t touch my hard disk during consequential startups.
I’ve of course tried your settings and measured beaviour for a while but there was NO difference in starting times of Writer (I didn’t measured other parts of OO). After boot it took 12 seconds to start it and all consequential startups took 6 secs. Both with old and new settings. Maybe one important fact is that I don’t have Java installed for OO.
End of Quote.
The only person with a brainsize worthy of being considered a human one. No, really.
Need proof? Load OO with default settings for first time and measure load time. Now do all the tweaking you want. Reboot and then load OO again. Feeling owned? You should. :)
i suggest a real method to increase performance of OpenOffice. the only way out is DOCK TO TRAY. by using kdocker or alltray.
but there is a difficulty. in manual mode (when you by using mouse indicates window) kdocker succesfully kick openoffice window to tray, but through command line it did not work by default. the solution is to define window ID of opened OpenOffice window and transfer it to kdocker.
here is script that you need put in $HOME/.kde/Autostart/office-to-tray.sh
#!/bin/bash
/opt/openoffice.org2.4/program/scalc -norestore &
sleep 15
/usr/local/bin/kdocker -w `/usr/X11R6/bin/xwininfo -root -children -tree | /bin/grep “OpenOffice.org Calc” | awk ‘{ print $1 }’` &
/opt/openoffice.org2.4/program/swriter -norestore $HOME/.1.doc
sleep 5
/usr/local/bin/kdocker -w `/usr/X11R6/bin/xwininfo -root -children -tree | /bin/grep “.1 – OpenOffice.org Writer” | awk ‘{ print $1 }’` &
and you need put small simple .1.doc file to $HOME.
the result: celeron 1800,512Mb,FC4,KDE , xls file 450kb open for 5 seconds!
and if use icewm even 4 seconds:)
well its still kind of slow on the first run after I boot up… but opens in seconds
Good tweak.
WOW….. Great.. Thanks
Thanks to ghacks.. :-)
That worked like a charm…thanks..