Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I am using Impress to broadcast a slide show of about 10 slides 24x7 to the units in our condo via closed-circuit TV. Problem is that the slide timing increases gradually over time from the 10 sec/slide originally selected to several minutes per slide. (As an example I started the slide show around noon on Friday and two days later the timing is now 5.25 minutes per slide). This is clearly unacceptable in this application.

I am running the slide show on an old Dell Dimension XPS T450 Pentium 3 machine upgraded to the maximum memory it will accept, 768MB. I am running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon with all updates. Following advice from this forum I uninstalled the Open Office version that came with Ubuntu and installed the Debian distribution Open Office 2.3.1 from this web site.

I think there is clearly a bug on the Impress slide show and would appreciate any advice.

It could be a memory leak. Can you check and see if the memory usage of the system is also changing over time? It could be that the system is having to swap more and more, thus slowing down.

As a workaround, you may need to kill and re-start the OOo process several times a day--something that can be automated fairly easily.

It definitely appears to be a memory leak. For debug purposes I am running the same slide show on my own Ubuntu machine (P4 1.5GHz w/ 1GB of RAM) with the same results. My system monitor show memory usage initially at 304 MB, increasing gradually in a few hours to 803 MB. I also found that it is necessary to exit the Impress application completely and restart it to restore the timing, it's not enough to stop and restart the slide show.

I would be interested in implementing the workaround you describe, but how do I get the system to start Impress, load the slide show and run in slide show mode? Please forgive the ignorance but I am a relative newcomer to Linux.

Hmm, this is harder than I thought.

I tried a simple shell script, something like this: This is the nice way to do it: just kill the job that was running the show, but I couldn't get it to cleanly stop everything, so I had to resort to the "sledgehammer" approach (commented out here). If you use that, watch out--this kills all running OOo processes--that may not be what you want.

I'm not sure why the nicer version doesn't work.

Thank you. I experimented a bit with your script and converted it to run with the Ubuntu distribution of OpenOffice. I also tried unsuccessfully to kill the process(es) using the kill command and ended up using the killall command as you suggested. No problem in my application since this is the only OpenOffice process running. Here is my adapted script:

#!/bin/bash

while true
do
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice -norestore -impress -show file:///"$HOME/Desktop/Channel3.odp" -splash-pipe=5 &
sleep 1h
killall soffice.bin
done

Thanks again for the workaround.
Ed

Well done! Thanks for sharing your solution.

I have tried to reproduce the problem, that a continuously running Impress show leaks memory, with only partial success. I find that a simple 3-slide show, cycling continuously without interruption for several hours, "leaks cpu" but not memory. I.e. the process displaying the show continuously takes more and more cpu time, but the memory use stays almost flat. The timing of the slides does not seem to slow down.

I've used the Fedora-packaged OOo 2.3.0 for testing; I'll try again with the OO.org 2.3.1 just to be sure.

Do you think the show itself could make a difference?

I could try something similar to your show--does it include more than simple text?

Would it be worth getting me a copy of your show as well?

I think this ought to be reported, if it can be reproduced.

PS: Ok, using OO.org 2.3.1 with my same 3-slide show, causes not OOo, but the X server, to eat memory: it grows to over 800M in less than 20'. Does that match what you see, or was it actually OOo that was taking memory?

My slide show, originally generated with PowerPoint 2007, is full of graphics, which may be contributing, or accelerating, the memory leak. If you want to try it, the current slide show is available in both Open Office and in the older PowerPoint 97-2003 formats at http://www.hamptonbeachclub.org/slides/

Ed

Filed as Issue 84974.