George Ou’s test seem to suggest that they are.  His results actually show that for anything but the smallest of documents using Calc (OpenOffice.org 2.0 equivalent of Microsoft Excel) is going to be tremendously slow.  In fact, I’d say that most users faced with a process that takes more than a 120 seconds is going to put people off (not to mention people who start jabbing at Ctrl + Alt + Del thinking that the system’s crashed).

OK, I’ll admit that I’ve not carried out any testing myself but I seriously doubt that my results would be much different to those George got (unless his system has some flaw or problem, which I doubt), which means that OpenOffice has changed from quite a speedy app that didn’t need a powerful system to run on into a lumbering dinosaur.

So, what’s gone wrong?  Well, the rush to an XML format doesn’t seem to have helped and the test results George Ou posts seem to suggest that it has also been badly implemented (suggested by the fact that it takes nearly 3 minutes of 100% CPU thrashing to just open the file).

I’m pretty sure that there will be updates soon to try to improve these performance results.  Also expect Microsoft to leap on these kinds of figures and run with them.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 10:28 and is filed under Kit!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.