Star Office Performance [Was Re: Linux on older laptop]

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I wouldn't even attempt to run StarOffice on this machine.  It barely runs
>on my 233 with 64  (soon to be 128) MB of RAM.  Maybe wordperfect would be
>better...  there's always vi.

The performance (IMHO) of Word Perfect on Linux is terrible, I can often type
ahead of it, something I cannot do with Star Office.  Using Star office alot (my
machine is a Dual P1-233 w/256Mb and UW-SCSI) and several other machines and
I've come to the conclusion that Star Office has some serious internal
performance limitations.  Even with 32Mb it works pretty well once it get's
started, but swamps a CPU whenever it does anything, and it is impossible to
really do two things at once (say recieve your e-mail, and type in a word
processing document at the same time).  Performance seems "bound up" by some
contention inside the program itself,  and why it spawns like eight soffice
"threads" I don't know, it never shows any activity on anything but two of
them.  I hope that Star Office 5.2 addresses these issues, but I missed by
chance to get a beta.