Startup time of OOo2, Firefox 1.5. Some surprises.

[Dan Kegel]

To see how reasonable it might be to use OOo 2.0.1 and Firefox 1.5
under Wine routinely, I benchmarked their startup time
on a Fedora Core 5 test 2 system under four conditions:
native vs. with wine from cvs, and with 416MB RAM vs. 96 MB RAM
(by booting with mem=96M; this was to simulate running on
one of those cheapo 128MB boxes that uses shared video RAM).
This was on a zippy Compaq Presario 3000 Athlon 64 3000+.
All apps were downloaded from openoffice.org and mozilla.com.

Results for first run of app after booting (1st column is startup time):

5 Firefox run1 native 416MB
12 Firefox run1 wine 416MB
11 Firefox run1 native 96MB
15 Firefox run1 wine 96MB
11 ooo run1 native 416MB
15 ooo run1 wine 416MB
60 ooo run1 native 96MB
37 ooo run1 wine 96MB

So wine is 1.4 to 2.5 times slower at app startup generally,
but when ram is really short, win32 openoffice starts
up with wine 1.5 times *faster* than the native linux version!
(Maybe because the Microsoft tools are better at avoiding I/O
or relocations during loading?)

I then measured how long it took to start up the app the second
time, when the cache was nice and hot:

3 Firefox run2 native 416MB
4 Firefox run2 wine 416MB
4 ooo run2 native 416MB
6 ooo run2 wine 416MB
4 Firefox run2 native 96MB
6 Firefox run2 wine 96MB
36 ooo run2 native 96MB
28 ooo run2 wine 96MB

The times are uniformly faster on the second run,
but the patter holds, i.e. wine is 1.4-1.5 times slower than native
generally, but win32 openoffice under wine is 1.5 times *faster* than
the native version when starved for RAM.
- Dan

--
Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv