2/22/2010 MS Office 2007 versus Open Office 2.

2 …
Real World IT
George Ou

April 27th, 2007

MS Office 2007 versus Open Office 2.2

shootout
Posted by George Ou @ 3:00 am

After yesterday's blog about the relevance of feature bloat, I figured that I would follow up with
some quantitative analysis on the performance characteristics to measure resource bloat. This isn't
the first time I've measured Office CPU and memory consumption of Microsoft Office and Open
Office. I have a whole series on it dating back to 2005. This time, I'm pitting Microsoft-backed
OOXML (Office Open XML) versus the OASIS-backed ODF (OpenDocument) format with
Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office 2.2.

Before I start, I'm going to disclose the hardware, OS, and software I'm using to measure these
two Office suites.

Hardware:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13

2 GB DDR2-800
ATI X800 PCI-Express Video Card
500 GB SATA-II hard drive housing the sample files

OS and software:

Windows Vista
Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer (resource measurement)
Microsoft Office 2007
OpenOffice.org 2.2

Baseline measurements for opening Application

CPU time
Memory Number of I/O
Application (milliseconds)

Kernel User Total Peak KB Read Write Other

MS Excel 234 328 562 24308 14 10 1422
OO.o Calc 625 593 1218 47788 364 12 13106
MS Word 171 390 562 31776 136 13 1957
OO.o Writer 343 687 1031 46700 365 8 13120
PowerPoint 250 343 593 27796 14 10 1403
Impress 484 843 1328 52804 921 16 14849
MS Access 484 531 1015 25836 12 9 967
OO.o Base 781 906 1687 49984 1708 176 22832

Office 2007 base memory consumption went up significantly compared to the Office 2003 I
measured last year, but it's still significantly less than OpenOffice.org 2.2. Some of the
OpenOffice.org applications, like Base, require Java to run, and the memory consumption spikes
over 70 megabytes as soon as you start navigating in the interface. However, the difference
between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org base resource consumption has gotten smaller. Next, we
test the CPU and memory utilization of Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc when opening the
same 16-sheet test file.

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2/22/2010 MS Office 2007 versus Open Office 2.2 …

Opening large spreadsheet

CPU time
Memory Number of I/O
Application (milliseconds)

Kernel User Total Peak KB Read Write Other

XLS (MS) 265 2046 2312 115548 39 17 2376
XLSX (MS) 296 12406 12703 65548 687 19 1854
ODS (OO.o) 968 58875 59843 253680 899 22 15822

From these results, we can see that the OpenOffice.org ODF XML parser (while vastly improved)
is still about 5 times slower than Microsoft's OOXML parser. OpenOffice.org also seems to
consume nearly 4 times the amount of RAM to hold the same data. While OpenOffice.org
continues to have fewer features than Microsoft Office, it continues to consume far more resources
than Microsoft.

Even though these results still show drastic differences in CPU and memory consumption between
MS Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.2, it's not as extreme as the results measured last year. It
would appear that OpenOffice.org 2.2 has gotten significantly better than version 2.0, but it still
has a lot to work on. The official OpenOffice.org performance-tuning wiki is tracking some of these
improvements. I praise their recent efforts and hope they keep it up because it will only bring
more competition to the table. So while I may still consider OpenOffice.org a resource pig, the pig
has definitely lost some weight.

George Ou is T echnical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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