Benchmark Tests: OpenOffice Windows Vs. OpenOffice Ubuntu

by Sam Dean - Mar. 31, 2009Comments (0)

Do you use the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications? If so, OpenOffice.org Ninja has a good post up showing cross-platform benchmark tests for OpenOffice and popular forks of it on Ubuntu and on Windows XP. The tests include basic OpenOffice, StarOffice, Go-oo (a Novell- and Microsoft-backed fork that we covered here), and Portable OpenOffice. The results include some surprises.

OpenOffice.org Ninja only tested Go-oo on Ubuntu, and I have found it to be faster than OpenOffice on Windows, but they point to some bugs that got in the way of Windows testing. It would have been good to see results for it. On cold start performance for the applications, the vanilla version of OpenOffice was the fastest on the Windows platform. Surprisingly, it was even faster than Portable OpenOffice.

There were also tests for "warm starts," which refers to starting OpenOffice again a second time when disk information is already cached in RAM. Here, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 on Ubuntu was the performance leader.

Also in the category of warm starts, there were tests opening documents. Here, vanilla OpenOffice on Windows had a 44 percent speed advantage over vanilla OpenOffice on Ubuntu, with the vanilla version on Windows performing the fastest of all the OpenOffice implementations and forks tested. The vanilla Windows implementation also had the advantage in scrolling tests, which testers attributed to better video drivers (video drivers are often cited as inferior on Linux platforms).

It's worth checking out OpenOffice.org Ninja's many other results. Kudos to them for doing tests in so many different types of categories. One thing that the tests definitely bear out is that OpenOffice on Windows is much more competitive than users on the Linux platform like to claim. Still, declaring an overall performance winner depends on what type of speed you're looking for.