Openoffice Very Slow On X/qt,pocketworkstation

[asola]

Hi All,

I have managed to install X/Qt, PocketWorkstation and OpenOffice 1.1.4 on my SL-C3000 (many thanks to Meanie for his great howto page).

However, OpenOffice programs seem to require a lot of time to load. The spreadsheet component, Calc, loads in about a minute. After that it seems to work normally. Is this normal or I need to configure something to speed the load process up?

I have a 128Mb swap for PocketWorkstation on the internal microdrive and PocketWorkstation is also installed here in a 768Mb loopback filesystem.

I have already read somewhere on this forum that I would be better off by using Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice for their much smaller memory footprint.

Thanks,
Andras

[bam]

you could make a 128mb swap on cf or sd card, that should speed things up. Or perhaps your swap is too small?

[asola]

you could make a 128mb swap on cf or sd card, that should speed things up. Or perhaps your swap is too small?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86078\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I think the microdrive is much better/faster than the CF/SD cards so that would probably not make it faster.

[bam]

you could make a 128mb swap on cf or sd card, that should speed things up. Or perhaps your swap is too small?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86078\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I think the microdrive is much better/faster than the CF/SD cards so that would probably not make it faster.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86148\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Straight from Hitachi's Spec's:
Sustained data rate (MB/sec)     4.3 - 7.2

Using a swap would be considered "sustained" during load.

I know the some sd cards are getting at least 9-10mb/s minimum transfer rate, and thats not the fastest card on the market, this is typical of a 66x card, now lexar I know makes a 80x card, and Sandisk just came out with a Extreme III card, @20mb/s minimum transfer rate....seems to be faster than the microdrive.

[Da_Blitz]

what they dont tell you is that the SD card spec only supports up to 10MB/s (version 1.0 of the spec) if you want the extra speed you need a pda that supports the new sd card spec that goes up to 20MB/s, also if you read the sandisk whitepapers you will see that you can only ever get that speed under very restrictive conditions which luckily you may be able to set up linux to meet. also note that the speed is for SD cards in 4bit SD mode, not mmc mode so you may not be abel to get that speed (depends on how good the sharp drivers are)

if you do a yahoo search for benchmarks of CF cards () you will see that the high speed compact flash are faster than the 4GB microdrive from hitachi, but that the new hitachi (6GB) is much faster than the old one

in addidtion i posted a link to a guy who worked out how to speed up the microdrive in his c3k after he upgraded to a 6GB model (link to site:https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12435&hl=hard+drive link to forum post: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=ht...language_tools)
he got the speed up from about 2.29MB/s to 5.26MB/s, quite a diffrence, this should help speed up open office

one last thing you can do would be to resize partion 3 so you can squezze a 128MB or 256MB partion for swap file usage in. the advantage would be that this partion would be on the outer rim of the platter and should be faster i also belive that this would mean you dont have the fat32 overhead for access and could also avoid fragmentation, but dont quote me on that

even if this post did go off topic a bit it would help you to speed up your reboot time as well as any speed up any program that uses swap or accsess the hard drive alot

hope that helps anyone, not just asola

[asola]

what they dont tell you is that the SD card spec only supports up to 10MB/s (version 1.0 of the spec) if you want the extra speed you need a pda that supports the new sd card spec that goes up to 20MB/s, also if you read the sandisk whitepapers you will see that you can only ever get that speed under very restrictive conditions which luckily you may be able to set up linux to meet. also note that the speed is for SD cards in 4bit SD mode, not mmc mode so you may not be abel to get that speed (depends on how good the sharp drivers are)

if you do a yahoo search for benchmarks of CF cards () you will see that the high speed compact flash are faster than the 4GB microdrive from hitachi, but that the new hitachi (6GB) is much faster than the old one

in addidtion i posted a link to a guy who worked out how to speed up the microdrive in his c3k after he upgraded to a 6GB model (link to site:https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12435&hl=hard+drive link to forum post: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=ht...language_tools)
he got the speed up from about 2.29MB/s to 5.26MB/s, quite a diffrence, this should help speed up open office

one last thing you can do would be to resize partion 3 so you can squezze a 128MB or 256MB partion for swap file usage in. the advantage would be that this partion would be on the outer rim of the platter and should be faster i also belive that this would mean you dont have the fat32 overhead for access and could also avoid fragmentation, but dont quote me on that

even if this post did go off topic a bit it would help you to speed up your reboot time as well as any speed up any program that uses swap or accsess the hard drive alot

hope that helps anyone, not just asola
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86262\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Are these numbers for the reading operations or the writes? I heard that flash cards are MUCH slower at writing than reading so they are not ideal for swapping since that needs a lot of write operations.

Thanks for the help anyway, I will take a look at the link.

[bam]

what they dont tell you is that the SD card spec only supports up to 10MB/s (version 1.0 of the spec) if you want the extra speed you need a pda that supports the new sd card spec that goes up to 20MB/s, also if you read the sandisk whitepapers you will see that you can only ever get that speed under very restrictive conditions which luckily you may be able to set up linux to meet. also note that the speed is for SD cards in 4bit SD mode, not mmc mode so you may not be abel to get that speed (depends on how good the sharp drivers are)

if you do a yahoo search for benchmarks of CF cards () you will see that the high speed compact flash are faster than the 4GB microdrive from hitachi, but that the new hitachi (6GB) is much faster than the old one

in addidtion i posted a link to a guy who worked out how to speed up the microdrive in his c3k after he upgraded to a 6GB model (link to site:https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12435&hl=hard+drive link to forum post: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=ht...language_tools)
he got the speed up from about 2.29MB/s to 5.26MB/s, quite a diffrence, this should help speed up open office

one last thing you can do would be to resize partion 3 so you can squezze a 128MB or 256MB partion for swap file usage in. the advantage would be that this partion would be on the outer rim of the platter and should be faster i also belive that this would mean you dont have the fat32 overhead for access and could also avoid fragmentation, but dont quote me on that

even if this post did go off topic a bit it would help you to speed up your reboot time as well as any speed up any program that uses swap or accsess the hard drive alot

hope that helps anyone, not just asola
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86262\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

cool, then maybe i will invest in a 6gb microdrive rather that a sd or cf card....thanks:)

[Da_Blitz]

i belive those were the read numbers as they tend to be faster, you are right about the flash cards being slower at writeing but i am not sure if they are for the microdrive, i think its about the same, i wish i could find that link to the compact flash benchmark arcive (i forgot to post the link) as i could get the numbers from there.

i like  the microdrives more as they have unlimited amount of r/w and it sounds much cooler when you say i have a hard drive in my pda rather than i have a 4gb flash card

one guy replaced the microdrive with a compact flash and made the system faster as well so if you are using the loopback you could always put open office on an external cf card and run it from thier or replace the microdrive so you get more batterylife as well

[asola]

i belive those were the read numbers as they tend to be faster, you are right about the flash cards being slower at writeing but i am not sure if they are for the microdrive, i think its about the same, i wish i could find that link to the compact flash benchmark arcive (i forgot to post the link) as i could get the numbers from there.

i like  the microdrives more as they have unlimited amount of r/w and it sounds much cooler when you say i have a hard drive in my pda rather than i have a 4gb flash card

one guy replaced the microdrive with a compact flash and made the system faster as well so if you are using the loopback you could always put open office on an external cf card and run it from thier or replace the microdrive so you get more batterylife as well
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86390\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Could you tell me how fast OpenOffice programs load with your configuration? I feel that they wouldn't be acceptable even if I would make the storing drive faster.

If any of you here in the topic have measured load times, I would be grateful for them.

[mschellens]

Hi All,

I have managed to install X/Qt, PocketWorkstation and OpenOffice 1.1.4 on my SL-C3000 (many thanks to Meanie for his great howto page).

However, OpenOffice programs seem to require a lot of time to load. The spreadsheet component, Calc, loads in about a minute. After that it seems to work normally. Is this normal or I need to configure something to speed the load process up?

I have a 128Mb swap for PocketWorkstation on the internal microdrive and PocketWorkstation is also installed here in a 768Mb loopback filesystem.

I have already read somewhere on this forum that I would be better off by using Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice for their much smaller memory footprint.

Thanks,
Andras
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86001\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I already posted this in another thread:
OO 1.1.4 takes for me about 8min to load (128Mb swapfile on hdd3, pocketworkstation via loopback (640Mb).
I wonder how you get a loading time of just one minute?
ms

[mishka]

Hi All,

I have managed to install X/Qt, PocketWorkstation and OpenOffice 1.1.4 on my SL-C3000 (many thanks to Meanie for his great howto page).

However, OpenOffice programs seem to require a lot of time to load. The spreadsheet component, Calc, loads in about a minute. After that it seems to work normally. Is this normal or I need to configure something to speed the load process up?

I have a 128Mb swap for PocketWorkstation on the internal microdrive and PocketWorkstation is also installed here in a 768Mb loopback filesystem.

I have already read somewhere on this forum that I would be better off by using Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice for their much smaller memory footprint.

Thanks,
Andras
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86001\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hi, maybe the data tranfer speed is going down because you have reading and writing on your microdrive at the same time (speed might be less than a half compared to reading or writing only, I think).

If you put the swapfile on any other physical drive than the installation files, things might speed up because now you have reading only on the microdrive and writing only on SD or CF, no matter if it's a high speed card or not?

could that be an idea?

[mschellens]

Hi All,

I have managed to install X/Qt, PocketWorkstation and OpenOffice 1.1.4 on my SL-C3000 (many thanks to Meanie for his great howto page).

However, OpenOffice programs seem to require a lot of time to load. The spreadsheet component, Calc, loads in about a minute. After that it seems to work normally. Is this normal or I need to configure something to speed the load process up?

I have a 128Mb swap for PocketWorkstation on the internal microdrive and PocketWorkstation is also installed here in a 768Mb loopback filesystem.

I have already read somewhere on this forum that I would be better off by using Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice for their much smaller memory footprint.

Thanks,
Andras
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86001\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hi, maybe the data tranfer speed is going down because you have reading and writing on your microdrive at the same time (speed might be less than a half compared to reading or writing only, I think).

If you put the swapfile on any other physical drive than the installation files, things might speed up because now you have reading only on the microdrive and writing only on SD or CF, no matter if it's a high speed card or not?

could that be an idea?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86856\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

That would probably speed things up, but I wonder why for Andras, with a very
similar configuration to mine, the startup speed is about 8(!) times faster?
There has to be some explanation for this.
Any idea?

Regards,
ms

[asola]

Hi All,

I have managed to install X/Qt, PocketWorkstation and OpenOffice 1.1.4 on my SL-C3000 (many thanks to Meanie for his great howto page).

However, OpenOffice programs seem to require a lot of time to load. The spreadsheet component, Calc, loads in about a minute. After that it seems to work normally. Is this normal or I need to configure something to speed the load process up?

I have a 128Mb swap for PocketWorkstation on the internal microdrive and PocketWorkstation is also installed here in a 768Mb loopback filesystem.

I have already read somewhere on this forum that I would be better off by using Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice for their much smaller memory footprint.

Thanks,
Andras
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86001\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I already posted this in another thread:
OO 1.1.4 takes for me about 8min to load (128Mb swapfile on hdd3, pocketworkstation via loopback (640Mb).
I wonder how you get a loading time of just one minute?
ms
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86840\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

The ~1min I measured is for the second start of OO Calc in one PocketWorkstation session. I think this is more relevant than the first start because if you use the Zaurus frequently and you don't shut PocketWorkstation down (there is no need for this if you run it paralell to Qtopia) you would probably get this load time when you want to use Calc.

By the way, OO Write loads even slower than Calc. In fact, I couldn't even wait it over.

Some comparisson with Gnumeric, Abiword and Evolution:

- Abiword: First load: 1-1,5min. Regular use: 10s
- Gnumeric: First load: 1,5-2min Regular use: 15s
- Evolution: First load: 2,5-3min Regular use: 16s

How I measured: When I start the program there is no other program running in the background. If you previously run a program which needs a lot of memory (e.g. apt-get), you will get much longer load times.

I also tried to run Abiword, Gnumeric and Evolution together and it didn't make the load times much worse. This is not very surprising since they are all gtk based apps. This

It very much seems that I will drop OpenOffice in favour of Abiword and Gnumeric because these have acceptable load times on my Zaurus SL-C3000.

Evolution would be acceptable too but it is very much designed for large displays (you can't switch off the so I think I will use KDE Pim/Pi and Sylpheed instead. Sylpheed even has vcard integration for its access book so I believe it will be easy to use with Addressbook/pi (almost perfect integration).

[Da_Blitz]

putting the swap on a diffrent cf card will not help much as the 2 cards share the same bus, what would be sped up thogh is operations where the data is squirted to the hard drive and left to finish while a read od write to the other card happens, but the 16MB/s of bandwidth is shared between both devices (CF 1.0 spec) however if it supported the cf 3.0 spec we would have 66MB/s DMA read/writes as opposed to pio (yes thats right PIO)

another problem you would get is that read or writes to CF affect the bandwidth of the memorey as it uses the same bus as the SDRAM, therefore if you transfered 16MB in one second (which you cant for reasons i will explain) you would tie up the memory bus for CF usage for 1 second meaning you would not be able to accsess memory, i belive that tinkering with MCIO1 to speed up the HD was a way of bumping up the CF clock to get more than 16MB/s max but i would have to refer to the pxa manual

one thing that could be done is to fiddle with hdparm once you have installed it and get it to do read aheads of the data to precache some of the data to memory however it is probely best to never close the program or change to a diffrent one, or see if the program preloads components which you can disable (like acrobat reader or any acrobat product does, tweaking what it preloads greatly reduced boot up time)

i belive you would most likly recive a big speed boost from an overclock of both the mem and cpu speed to CPU: 624Mhz BUS: 312Mhz LCD:>78Mhz just be sure you change the core voltage before you change the speed or the cpu will hang and require a reset