Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[Mike McCarty]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 21:43 +0000, Andy Green wrote:
> 
>>Mike McCarty wrote:
>>
>>
>>>from its local disc. I just clicked on the "OpenOffice.org
>>>Writer Word processor" icon on the task bar at the bottom
>>>of my screen, and it was 58 seconds before it was ready
>>>to take a keystroke, on my 2.71 GHz Linux machine. On my
>>>400MHz Win98 machine, Word loads in less than 5 secs.
>>
> LOL.   And windows98 with the corresponding Word is much smaller than
> the current Word or OOo.
> 
> Also, I am interested in how you forced OO to take that long to load.
> Mine takes <10 seconds to load OOo 2.X from click to typing.

I didn't force it. It's a (painful) fact of life for me. In fact,
when I browse the web, I often don't look at a document if it's
.doc format just because OO will take so long to load.

> AMD 3000+ with 1gb memory and tons of services running concurrently
> including mysql, postgresql, httpd, providing print services, and
> others.

CPU is not the problem, as my system stays loaded only about 3% or so.
I'm pretty sure it's due to swap and virtual. From top...

Mem:    248088k total,   242384k used,     5704k free,    10280k buffers
Swap:   524120k total,   221064k used,   303056k free,    41596k cached

Only 5.7MB free. Doing another top, and sorting by memory ("M" command)
I get

 

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
   762 jmccarty  16   0  133m  48m  14m S  0.0 20.2  66:48.74 
thunderbird-bin
28320 jmccarty  15   0  182m  48m  13m S  0.0 19.9  24:16.30 mozilla-bin
  4159 root      15   0  184m  29m 5740 S  1.3 12.1 955:48.61 X
  4536 jmccarty  15   0 34376  11m 4592 S  0.3  4.8   4:16.79 gnome-terminal

So my mailer and web browser use *lots* of memory. After starting OO,
top looks like this...

 
                                                       Mem:    248088k 
total,   243184k used,     4904k free,     8540k buffers
Swap:   524120k total,   234580k used,   289540k free,    61244k cached

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2468 jmccarty  15   0  182m  50m  33m S  0.0 20.8   0:07.62 soffice.bin
   762 jmccarty  16   0  133m  41m  12m S  0.0 17.2  66:55.95 
thunderbird-bin
28320 jmccarty  15   0  182m  31m 9548 S  0.0 13.0  24:16.36 mozilla-bin
  4159 root      15   0  185m  21m 4504 S  9.3  8.8 955:52.11 X
  4536 jmccarty  15   0 34376 9428 3680 S  6.7  3.8   4:17.86 gnome-terminal

So my guess is that the mailer (Thunderbird) got rolled to virtual,
and that rolling to virtual and pulling in OO takes 58 seconds
because of that.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!