[ Thanks to Andrew
Ziem for this link. ]
“Like previous benchmarks, this OpenOffice.org
benchmark uses automation to precisely measure the duration of a
series of common operations: starting the application, opening a
document, scrolling through from top to bottom, saving the
document, and finally closing both the document and application.
Automation is much more precise than a human with a stopwatch, and
with the small durations in these tests, automation is necessary.
Each of the five tests are repeated for 10 iterations. Before each
set of 10 iterations, the system reboots. The purpose of rebooting
is to measure the difference in cold start performance where
information is not yet cached into fast memory. A reboot marks a
pass, and there are 10 passes. That means for each edition of
OpenOffice.org, there are 100 iterations. Multiplying by 5 tests
and by 7 editions of OpenOffice.org yields 3500 total measurements
collected for this article.“Some editions don’t have a quickstarter, so I disabled it for
all editions as in previous articles.”