Smaller OO.org?

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Nagato Yuki
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Smaller OO.org?

Post by Nagato Yuki »

Emm, IMHO, OO.org used too much HDD space as I expected.
I just want to use the writer for editing ODF files, but I have to install writer of OO.org nearly 230M for windows version.
However MS-Office 2003 takes only ~267M, just Excel, PowerPoint, Word core component.
I know that OO.org uses a ton of share libraries to reduce the size, and OO.org is much smaller than fully installed MS-Office 2003.

But...Will the OO.org optimize the libraries to make it better modularized and to reduce install size?
TerryE
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by TerryE »

this one has been asked many times. You need to compare OOo to a fuller MS install: Word, Access, Excel, PPT. OOo is a bundle and the reuse makes it difficult to unbundle. The only downside is the disk space at how many cents per Gb? I suppose we could charge less for Writer only but oops one third of zero = zero. Now we can' t. :-)
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Nagato Yuki
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by Nagato Yuki »

TerryE wrote:this one has been asked many times. You need to compare OOo to a fuller MS install: Word, Access, Excel, PPT. OOo is a bundle and the reuse makes it difficult to unbundle. The only downside is the disk space at how many cents per Gb? I suppose we could charge less for Writer only but oops one third of zero = zero. Now we can' t. :-)
Sorry for making such qustion, but I really don't get anything about it in searched posts.

Yes, I know it should be compared with full installed MS. But, smaller (no unnecessary functions) OOo is much better, isn't it? :D
Oh, even the price of HDD approximately equal to zero, it won't be zero! :D
(Ah, I don't know how to get the useful HDD for free. :lol: )
I don't want that OOo grows like Windows Vista, bigger size but less improvement.

And, it seems that MS Office 2003 is able to choose the sub-components(help files, templates, etc.) of every component (Word, Excel), but OOo isn't.
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by TerryE »

A personal view here:

OOo as an application suite has a huge number of "function points", on a par with products such as MSO and SAP. The best way to produce a quality product on this scale it to have a small on very talented team lay out the overall architecture and develop the core. The core should be kept as tight as possible and components loosely coupled into this framework. This allows the component teams to be likewise tight. If you think about it this is largely how Linux (not just the kernel but the entire OS portfolio) has been developed.

From looking at various bits of the OOo source, it didn't develop this way. It started life as a Office Automation suite developed by a small German company called StarDivision. I suspect that the team was a mix of a few very bright developers and a bunch of middling (usually inexperienced = cheap) ones. The main code was cut in the period 1995-2000. The main priority was to turn out those function points because 30% of an OA suite is not a very marketable product. So the coding is of a very variable standard and some architectural decisions have had huge (negative) performance and scaling impacts. Despite the PR hype, the code base is pretty tangled.

There has been a constant pressure to match MSO functionality, and this causes an inexorable pressure which makes it very difficult to rework some of tackier bits of implementation. Notwithstanding this the product work and works well in many areas. It also builds and runs across a wide range of platforms. Slowly but surely the OOo team is trying to sort out the worst of this architectural issues. OOo has a viable future, but is also tied to its history.
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AndrewZ
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by AndrewZ »

You can probably compress OOo using UPX, the executable packer, but OpenOffice.org tend to only grow larger.

Here are the installation sizes for various versions on Linux since 2005:
215M ooo115
279M ooo200
287M ooo201
311M ooo202
320M ooo203
316M ooo204
323M ooo210
331M ooo220
368M ooo230
395M ooo240
411M ooo300_m3
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TerryE
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by TerryE »

I wouldn't go down the UPX route if I were you. This works well for monolithic EXEs that you will want all in memory anyway. However very almost none of OOo is in the soffice.exe. Most is in the DLLs and libraries. If you are really that bothered about the size on disk, then you should tackle this at a lower level in the file system: Rightclick on the C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.x folder and choose Properties->Advanced->Compress contents to save disk->Apply. This reduces the 2.4 install from 323 to 210 Mbytes. However this does come at the cost of slightly slower load times.
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Nagato Yuki
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by Nagato Yuki »

TerryE wrote:I wouldn't go down the UPX route if I were you. This works well for monolithic EXEs that you will want all in memory anyway. However very almost none of OOo is in the soffice.exe. Most is in the DLLs and libraries. If you are really that bothered about the size on disk, then you should tackle this at a lower level in the file system: Rightclick on the C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.x folder and choose Properties->Advanced->Compress contents to save disk->Apply. This reduces the 2.4 install from 323 to 210 Mbytes. However this does come at the cost of slightly slower load times.
Compressing files at filesystem is a way to reduce the installed size of OOo.
(...but it seems much greater difference in size, comparing MSO...)
However, it seems there is no way to make OOo more modularize. As TerryE saying, OOo tied to its history, but I may not see any effort of resolving architectural issues, while the the installed size is only growing up...
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AndrewZ
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by AndrewZ »

Thanks for the idea in this thread. I wrote two articles about it and how increasing size is perfectly normal.

1. OpenOffice.org obeys Moore's Law?
2. OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office vs. Moore's Law
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TerryE
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by TerryE »

Nice articles Andrew :)
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Nagato Yuki
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by Nagato Yuki »

OO.o 3 ,just install writer 310 MB (326,069,683 bytes)
with NTFS compress, 192 MB (201,348,004 bytes)
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acknak
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by acknak »

Yes, OOo is bloated and duplicates a lot of functions, but sorry, I don't see where it's worth worrying about.

400M is a nickel's-worth of disk space (a dime on a laptop or 15 cents on a flash drive).

Yes, it can be a problem on older machines, but on those machines a lot of things become problems. I don't agree that it would be a good investment of the developers time to make reducing the package size a priority.

I recently took a look at the new OOo3 "modular" packaging to see how the space breaks down. This was one of the rc releases, installed on Linux, where the total space used was 383Mb:

UNO Runtime Environment—the lowest layer
40/383M, 10%

Basis layer—brand-independent code and data (e.g. dictionary, fonts, icons, ...)
334/383M, 87%
  • 224 67% basis3.0/program
    83 25% basis3.0/share
    27 8% basis3.0/help
    1.6 <1% basis3.0/presets
Brand layer: brand specific resources (program binaries)
10/383M, 3%

So the bulk (almost 90%) of it is in the "shared" part, and about 2/3 of that is program code and 1/3 is data (help, dictionaries, fonts).

The one place where size is a real problem is updates: it's difficult to update OOo with a small patch, you have to download the whole thing. That is beginning to be addressed with the re-structuring: now you only have to download about 60% of the total package to get a patch ;-) Well, it's a step in the right direction.
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TheGurkha
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Re: Smaller OO.org?

Post by TheGurkha »

I agree - I would much prefer to see development effort be put towards feature content, debugging and robustness than trying to shave down the size.

Yes it might be 'big' but it's all relative. My first PC (back in the day) that had a hard drive had the whopping capacity of 20Mb! But today's drives take 400Mb and don't even notice, and more and more pople are getting faster Internet connections, so the size isn't a really a big issue.
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