Title pretty much says it all.
The installed LO takes about 1-2 seconds to start up, while LO Portable takes about 8 seconds (warm start) and 13 seconds (cold start). Of course, from the same drive.
Now, I did not install the regular LO with everything, so maybe it's not a fair comparison. But still, it seems like too big of a difference.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
The local LibreOffice installation will have the quickstarter running. Kill it and then you'll have a more fair comparison.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
I didn't even install the quickstarter.
I've never seen LibreOffice start from a cold start in 1-2 seconds on a machine. Maybe it could on a machine with a very fast SSD. A cold start means you're not using the quick starter (which is installed by default) and you haven't yet started it before on the given PC ever (so it's not cached and not in Windows prefetch). Once you've run it once, it will generally start up in about a second on a decent machine. Additionally, LO Portable will take longer for the initial start to setup its settings. On my machine LO and LO Portable perform about identically in initial start and secondary start times when run from the same hard drive. When run from a flash drive, either will be significantly slower, of course.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
The "cold start" for me is after Windows restart. For LO it's 5-6 seconds, the 1-2 seconds is for the warm start (second time in a Windows session), which is mostly what I'm interested in.
In any way it's much faster than LO Portable. And I've confirmed this on two different PCs.
Oh and I definitely didn't install the quick starter, it goes against my no-bloat, portable-loving way.
Are you running LO and LO Portable off the same drive? If not, that's a factor. Especially if the LO Portable drive is external as Windows may not prefetch external drive EXEs, which slows secondary starts. As I said, for me, they start the same when running on the same drive. Another possible factor is antivirus. Many free antivirus products have abysmal performance with compressed EXEs.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It's not because of AV either. One of the PCs where I tried doesn't have an AV.
The standard LO has an option ... see >Options>>Memory ... to keep the quick starter in memory. There's no such option in LO Portable.
If you can't enjoy yourself, enjoy somebody else ...
The Quick Starter is designed to start when Windows starts up with a LOCAL copy of LibreOffice. No such options would make sense with portable software like LibreOffice Portable. It's just a cheat to load LO in the background anyway. You can simulate it by having LibreOffice Portable start with the PortableApps.com Platform and then just minimizing it. It's the same thing, just with the icon showing on your taskbar.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Hi John, and thank you for your comment.
I myself normally start a copy of LO in desktop 3 of VirtuaWin Portable, then do all my actual LO work in desktop 1. Works like a charm!
If you can't enjoy yourself, enjoy somebody else ...