What was fast is now SLOW!

Polo · Guest

Running RC3 on Mandrake 9.1 with OO quickstarter. Until a week ago, when I launched OO or clicked on a .doc file, the program fired up pretty quick and ran well. Now the application hangs at the default template during launch, and after it finally displays the document, takes seemingly forever to show the print dialog box or accept inputs in that dialog. What happened? TIA.
Polo

linoofan · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 2:52 pm Post subject:

I've had the same problem, with 1.1RC. In the past (1.0), I've tried deleting the ~/.openoffice directory, which has worked. Haven't tried it this time, because I don't feel like losing all my settings.

Does anyone have any idea why OOo gets so slow after using it for a while? Is there some cache directory that needs to be emptied out or something? Any help would be appreciated.
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Steve

The Liquidator · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 3:19 pm Post subject:

I had this problem on various versions of OOo and SO on Mandrake 9. OOo would suddenly load very slowly (2-3 minutes!) but once up and running it worked as normal.

I eventually put it down to Mandrake (I was running 9.0 at the time) given that total deletion of OOo and reinstall did not solve the problem. An "upgrade" reinstall of Mandrake would invariably cure it. Howeevr I wonder whether it could in fact have been the KDE environment, which seems very sloww from time to time. Are you using KDE or Gnome? Have you tried running OOo in the other environment? If so, what happens?

Ian

linoofan · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 8:27 pm Post subject: A solution??

I might have found a potential culprit, on Linux at least: Try deleting the file ~/OpenOffice1.1/user/psprint/pspfontcache. (Note that your OpenOffice directory (located in your home directory) may be named something other than "OpenOffice1.1"; mine is actually named ".openoffice".)

In my informal tests loading a medium-sized Excel spreadsheet, OOo took 119 seconds average to load with a pspfontcache file of 2.7 MB. When I moved pspfontcache to a temporary directory (effectively erasing it), the same spreadsheet loaded in 18.5 seconds average. Moving pspfontcache back to the psprint directory caused OOo to load in 119 seconds again. Note that this is on a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 machine.

I looked at the options in OOo to see if there's a way to limit the size of pspfontcache, but I didn't see one. Any OOo developers out there who know if there's a way to do this?

Alternatively, one could write a script to delete pspfontcache before starting OOo, or perhaps when the file gets above a certain size.
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Steve

linoofan · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 9:28 pm Post subject:

Another post had an excellent suggestion: make pspfontcache read-only. I'd first delete pspfontcache, then run OOo once to regenerate it as a very small file, then make it read-only:

cd ~/.openoffice/user/psprint
rm pspfontcache
soffice
chmod -w pspfontcache

This removes write access to the file.
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Steve

cwchia · Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 10:31 pm Post subject:

Excellant!

My staff (well, my only staff) almost killed me when her OOo is getting aeons to bring up he printer dialog to display. Until I make a search on this and did what the Gurus said. I close OOo, then renamed the pspfontcash to pspfontcash.old. Restart and closing OOo again so that it creat a new pspfontcash and take out the write access to it. BINGO, the print dialog comes up almost instantaneously on my MDK 9.2 on Celeron 2.0 with 256Mb Ram.

Laughing

Half-migrated · Guest

Thanks for the tip regarding pspfontcache -- it seems to be working. I got puzzled today when I put OO on my Win 2000 800 MHz laptop and found that it launches in 3 s, while it takes 12 - 20 s to launch on my Mandrake 9.1 1.7 GHz Athalon at home! Are there similar issues (and fixes) for Mozilla and Evolution (I know, wrong place to ask)? It amazes me at how slowly most apps seem to launch in the Linux distros I run (Mandrake and Knoppix).

The Liquidator · Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 1:08 am Post subject:

Now I have the same issue, only the other way around.

OOo for me launches considerably quicker in Linux (Mdk 10) than in Win 98SE, on a dual-booting machine.

Strange, isn't it

Ian

newoldy · Newbie Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 1 Location: Ely UK

New to forum but instant answers here

On SUSE Linux dual boot with Windows and using Windows less and less also my wife getting into it PC 1GHz 300+MB

OO got slow read these forum messages and deleted the 793KB pspfontcache file started OO once then 15.5KB set to read only and hey presto OO loads lightingly fast prints faster etc

So great and thnks all

TSloth · Newbie Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 3

Thank you, thank you linoofan for this solution! Very Happy

Removing pspfontcache (927KB!!), letting OOo create a new one (30.6KB), and making it read-only has fixed the slow OOo startup time and the excrutiatingly long times to bring up the print dialog, to select a printer, and to print.

I use version 1.1.0. Has this been fixed in a later version? If not, this solution needs to be better publicized.

Thanks again,
- TSloth

linoofan · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 2:32 pm Post subject:

TSloth,

You're welcome! I'm really glad to see that this topic has helped so many people!

As to whether it's been fixed in a later version, I can't say. I've downloaded the development version for release 2.0 (1.9.m49) and the pspfontcache file is still read/write. But I haven't used it enough to know if pspfontcache still grows very large; right now, mine is only 36K.
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Steve

Dropout · OOo Enthusiast Joined: 27 Apr 2004 Posts: 110

My install doesn't have the pspfontcache file but is slow to start.

Any ideas?

Dropout

linoofan · Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 5:35 am Post subject:

Dropout,

Can you give us some specifics about your system? What are your machine specs? What version of OOo are you running? What distribution?
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Steve

Dropout · OOo Enthusiast Joined: 27 Apr 2004 Posts: 110

Hi.

I'm running OOo 1.1.2 (don't know what build - where can I find it?) on Windows 98 (not SE) on a P3 750.

I have two printers installed, one local and one network. The rest of the network is often down. The default is the local printer.

I do not have Micro$oft Office installed.

Thanks.

Dropout

linoofan · Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 9:30 am Post subject:

Hmm, it could just be that your system is underpowered -- OOo is quite a resource hog. How much memory do you have? Have you tried running it on a faster system?

Also, do you use the OpenOffice "quickstarter" feature? It makes OOo startup much faster, although it takes time during initial boot/login.
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Steve