Well, haven't blogged in a couple of weeks... Been pretty busy recently with work and things. Seriously lacking in exercise, hopefully will make up for that this weekend. In terms of dev stuff, it's mostly been work things, although I have worked a little on a PIM synchronisation app - I'll hopefully have a bit of spare time for that in the next week or two, will have to see.
I've 'upgraded' my amd64 dapper desktop to i386 edgy. It's a relief to be rid of the little amd64 annoyances (32-bit OpenOffice, no wmv9/flash without lots of 32-bit binaries/dodgy reference decoders, no wine, 32-bit distributed binaries, etc.) and I'm quite impressed with how usable edgy is already. Less impressive is the actual progress made since dapper, but I'm sure there are bigger things to come (and hopefully a new nvidia driver that fixes the font problems).
I read a recent post on p-g-o about OpenOffice loading documents faster than Abiword in edgy - I'd just like to point out that that person is either a) better than me, or b) completely ignoring the amount of time it takes to load OOo. On my AMD64 3200+, gig of dual-channel RAM, it takes ~33 seconds to load up OOo (and that's after loading and closing it a couple of times, so likelihood is there's an amount of caching there). Abiword takes ~3 seconds to load. Needless to say, there's room for some improvement there :)
I've also populated an Amazon wish-list recently, y'know, in case you felt like buying me stuff to encourage me to work on Dates/Contacts/etc.. Go on, you know you want to..
Nick Drake - One Of These Things First
Luis Villa says:
Yo, dude- when dates/eds on 770 can read/cache my google ical feed, make sure to announce it and repost that wishlist, and the Cuban Santa Claus will deliver something :)
Ryan Bair says:
I'd say you (or edgy) have some OOo issues. A cold start on my Intel 820 w/ 1Gb takes 3 seconds. After closing, restarts take 1-2 seconds.
tim says:
Warm start of OOo writer takes 4 seconds here (dapper drake on AMD 3000, 1 GB ram). Note: I have no OOo-quickstarter stuff installed.
Could your slowness be caused by a debug build of OOo? Just a guess.
Karl Zollner says:
18 seconds to load(freshly booted machine, ie.cold ) OOo on 2.4Ghz Celeron with a pathetically slow 40GB HD:
root@dell:/home/mtdman# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 1720 MB in 2.00 seconds = 859.95 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.04 seconds = 21.02 MB/sec
sound like dma is not turned on for your harddrive
try cat /proc/ide/hda/settings
(or something similiar for sata drives)
amd check if using_dma is set to 1
the only plausibile explantation for such a ridiculously slow start up time is a totally underperforming IDE/SATA driver-which is either improperly configured(no dma) or the wrong modules are being loaded into the kernel.
lspci -vv can help you figure out what chipset is being used, and then you can look in your kernel config to see which IDE/SATA driver corresponds to your hardware- in some cases too many modules are being autoloaded by dapper which can negatively impact performance in this case isolate which driver is appropriate for your hardware and place a list of the incorrectly loaded IDE/SATA driver modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist- if the appropriate module for your hardware isn't being loaded(ie. doesnt show up in lsmod) then you will need to recompile your kernel.
If the correct modules are being loaded and everything is properly configure it is time to post bug to kernel.org bugzilla and write an email to the maintainer of that module complaining about how the driver is crippling your rather powerful machine.
I have never experienced 32s start time for OOo in any of it's incarnations on any hardware since before OOo 1.0 was even released.
hope this helps ....
Chris Lord says:
$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3496 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1748.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 174 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.88 MB/sec
That looks ok to me - It genuinely is that slow, I've no idea why :/ (it's slower to start than it was in dapper under amd64) I'm sure it's something they'll sort out, but just pointing out that OOo in Edgy is by no measure fast at the moment :) (contrary to that, everything else has sped up massively)
Phil Trickett says:
If you are writing a sync app, PLEASE have a look at opensync: http://www.opensync.org/
If I could use opensync with dates and contacts, to sync my 770 with my phone and desktop, that would be great....
Chris Lord says:
Phil - You're in luck, it uses OpenSync ;)
Hub says:
AbiWord vs OpenOffice, sometime OpenOffice really wins for loading the document. We (AbiWord) have what I would call MAJOR bottlenecks in our engine, either in the piecetable or the formatter (table for example). It is not about bloat it is about badly written algorithms. I myself try to track them down sometime, but it is not always easy.
Any comments?
