Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Good day everyone,
I am coming to a sweet end, finally, with my clinic DB however, I have a little problem. I am trying to run the BASE DB on a netbook Aspire One and I have noticed that it's incredibly slow, or at least slower than my home PC. Obviously, asking why would be silly but I was also wondering whether the actual DB structure could/should be improved to run smoother on a netbook.
I have about 15 tables, about 20 forms, 10 queries and about 7-8 forms (although these numbers are not final yet). Some of the forms are complex with several subform, listbox for PKs and FKs assignments, etc...
Is there a way to maximize the performance? or a netbook is simply not meant to run this kind of heavy-duty software?

I am also thinking to remove packages and utilities which are that I don't need from my slackbox.
Regards,

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases the chances of a reply (Hagar, Moderator).

try /tools/options/OpenOffice.org : Memory and adjust the amount of memory allocated to OpenOffice. Also reduce the number of undo steps - I use 10, others recommend 20, but I think 100 is too many. Your netbook has a real disk drive or an SSD? SSD is slow - only fitted to the first netbooks I think, 20 GB.

Flash disks do not play well with databases and vice versa.
In addition there is a performance issue with Base+Linux+JDBC (if you happen to run Linux and a Java database).

it appears that, as suggested by Villeroy, linux doesn't much like Base and JDBC. No matter how much memory I allocate and/or undo steps i choose, it still takes a good 10seconds for any forms to load.
Thanks anyway for all your inputs.
Regards,

however wrote:...it still takes a good 10seconds for any forms to load.

Early netbooks were based on Atom processors and were typically shipped with 1GB of memory (RAM). Their SSD's were first-generation, ranging from 4GB to 16GB in size.

All of these factors work against you in real-world applications such as Base.
(1) The popular Atom 270 processor (passmark score) was about 3x slower than the slowest x86 CPU's available for low-end laptops of that day.
(2) 1GB of RAM is generally enough as long as background tasks are kept to a minimum and you don't use tabbed browsers (which can average 80 MB per tab) or other memory-intensive software while running Base.
(3) As any drive reaches the last 10% of it's capacity, all drive I/O gets slow. This is exacerbated by low capacity SSD drives.
(4) First-gen SSD drives did not have TRIM support. This causes them to get slower with use as write operations become more time-consuming due to erasure overhead.

So when you combine a sloooow CPU, with a maxed SSD drive without TRIM support, and multi-tasking that pushes the RAM capacity -- you get Forms that take 10 seconds to load. And you risk paging...which will slow your system to a crawl...which can be bad for the laptop because it might get thrown out of a third-story window during paging...which can injure a small child on the street below...which can get you put in jail...which can drive you insane...which can be bad for your health...so avoid paging.

To maximize performance, make sure there's a few GB's free on the SSD, avoid multi-tasking or maintain at least 200 MB free RAM when running Base, and eliminate the Base installation folder from your resident, on-access, virus-protection scans (perhaps enabled for only for full-disk scans). Otherwise, there's very little you can do.

However...as Villeroy mentioned...if the database itself is running slow (slow record navigation, etc.)...it's possible you're encountering the Linux+Java+Base issue so maybe check your version of Java. Java 1.6.0.22 is still fast with OOo 3.3.0 and pre-LibO 3.5.x. But any Java version from 20 to 22 seems to perform well with Linux+Java+Base.