Saving takes forever - replicated on dozens of machines

dansopen · General User Joined: 15 Nov 2005 Posts: 5

Hi, I'm the IT director of a new school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're trying to be innovative and support opensource software, our first step towards that is using OOo instead of M$ Office. Coincidentally, I was rolling out the first of about 80 PCs last week when I noticed that OOo 2.0 was out. I was a bit nervous with it being so new, but decided to load it up on the new machines, Dell laptops with 512MB RAM and Celeron M 1.5 processors. All the laptops are running XP Pro on a Windows Server 2003 network with Active Directory. I hope to someday implement a Linux environment, but for the time being, Windows AD is just too useful in its management functionality to pass up.

Here's the problem. About 75% of the time in the orientation classes I have held, users wait an extremely long time for OOo to regain responsiveness after trying to save a new docuement and sometimes in simply trying to close the Writer app. All the laptops use roaming profiles and I believe this is related to the problem as I do not see it happening when the laptops are off the network. I actually had to take a part of the laptops off of folder redirection (the "docuements and settings" folder) because OOo was taking an extremely long period of time to start up. With all of these problems, I fear I'm going to have to shell out the cash for M$ Office. Any thoughts on this?

probe1 · Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 7:31 am Post subject:

Saving in OpenDocument format takes a bit longer than saving in "old" OOo 1.1.x document types SXW/SXC. But this shouldn't take "long" at all.

So please check if you are saving to a network folder? Is the share mapped to a local drive letter?
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DateTime2 extension: insert date, time or timestamp, formatted to your needs

dansopen · General User Joined: 15 Nov 2005 Posts: 5

No, I'm not saving to a drive letter, we're saving to the "My Documents" folder which has been redirected to a network path \\fileserver\students_profiles\%username%. But the odd thing is that the delay happens not when you actually name the file and click save, it happens when you click the File menu and then click save to begin the process of naming and saving a file. I believe this has to do with Window's roaming profiles and not where the docuement will eventually be saved. I have tested this with a user whose profile does not roam but is saving to a network location and the delay is not present. I'm 99% sure this is related to roaming profiles. If that is the case, many (if not all) enterprise users will have the same problem. I'm working hard on narrowing this down. The odd thing is that when a user's profile roams, it actually becomes local on the machine that person is logged on to and then syncs at logoff. OOo shouldn't even know the profile roams which leads me to believe it is more complicated. Ugh.

Any and all thoughts would be great. I don't want to spend $7,000 on M$ Office!!!

probe1 · Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 4:02 pm Post subject:

I'm currently working in a windows network environment with some +2000 users, two machines with XP/Pro.
I got 20 network shares mapped to local drive letters (for faster access)
I use doc/xls documents of medium sizes (50-80 pages, 2000 rows/10 columns of data). Sometimes I do observe the same "timeouts" up to one minute. My collegues have the same problems (sometimes). So I can feel your pain.

Oh, excuse me I forgot to mention it's MS Office we are using.

So: YES, I would second it's a roaming profile or/and network thing. Quite sure you don't solve thisproblem with MSO.
_________________
Cheers
Winfried
My Macros
DateTime2 extension: insert date, time or timestamp, formatted to your needs

dansopen · General User Joined: 15 Nov 2005 Posts: 5

Hmmmmm. But probe1, no other app shows this time-out. I'm going to install Office 2003 on one machine to test this. I'll let you know how it goes.

probe1 · Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:47 am Post subject:

Yes - most other applications here too don't show this:

MS Explorer is quick on displaying a mounted directory.
I got half a douzend apps where their dialogue's to display available drives pop up quick.

It's MSO here which has a pause....

Good luck
_________________
Cheers
Winfried
My Macros
DateTime2 extension: insert date, time or timestamp, formatted to your needs

dansopen · General User Joined: 15 Nov 2005 Posts: 5

Sorry probe1, but this is an OOo issue. I have now tested M$Office 2003 under the exact same conditions and it has absolutely no delay/time-out whatsoever when saving. OpenOffice.org 2.0 takes anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds (!!!) to respond after clicking save under the file menu and then another 20 to 40 seconds to respond after naming the file and clicking save. Subsequent attempts, thank God, are immediate with no delay. Still, this is completely unacceptable. Having a class of 8th graders sit quietly as their machine takes 80 seconds to respond is impossible. They freak out! "Why don't we have Microsoft??? This program stinks!!!" Is all I hear.

If anyone can help me troubleshoot this, I'd be grateful. I think there must be someway around this. It is not saving to the network, per se, that is the issue, because users who do not use roaming profiles do not see this issue even when saving to the network. Does anyone have any thoughts at all? Can anyone replicate this with their roaming profiles?

Thanks!

dansopen · General User Joined: 15 Nov 2005 Posts: 5

Last Friday, a teacher at the school lost all the changes she made to a spreadsheet when all the menus became greyed out. She couldn't save, print, copy, paste, etc. After that happened, and with this massive delay in saving files, I just forked over $5,000 for Microsoft Office. What a massive bummer. Good luck to the rest of you.