Bernhard Tritsch posted an article detailing his test results comparing the scalability of OpenOffice.org 2.1, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Office 2007 on 32 bit and 64 bit Terminal Server platforms.

Bernhard writes:

“The results show that roughly 30 to 40% more users can sign on to the platform with Microsoft Office 2003 than with OpenOffice.org 2.1 where the hardware is completely identical and the terminal server on Windows Server 2003 SP1 is configured the same way. Even for terminal servers with Microsoft Office 2007, one can expect that the system resources can be used roughly 20% more efficiently than is possible on a system with OpenOffice.org.

For the 32-bit Windows server with OpenOffice.org 2.1, the hard drive is drawn upon increasingly when there are more than 50 users due to the main memory used during the testing procedure; this increase in turn leads to longer waiting times on the system for individual users. A similar pattern emerges for the 32-bit server with Microsoft Office 2003, but only with more than 100 users, while the same may be said for Microsoft Office 2007 with 80 users or more.

One of the main reasons behind the differences exhibited in the performance of the different Office Suites has to do with the specific memory working set used by the associated applications. The different ways in which page files are used play a significant role in these differences. During the memory management of the operating system for both versions of Microsoft Office, data is often paged too early, whereas this occurs much later with OpenOffice. There are clear differences between the architecture of the run-time environments. While Microsoft Office uses standard Windows applications, OpenOffice includes a container applications serving as control instance and sandbox environment for all OpenOffice applications.”

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