Slow saving

[superdirk]

I am using Draw to create a Poster (1 x 2 m) containg some line art and some tiff/jpeg images. The file size is ~2 MB but saving it after changes takes more than 2 min! What can I do about that?
Win XP, OO 2.4. Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz, 512 MB.
The template for this file was in PPT and I imported it via Impress and then saving as *.odg.
Thanks!

[Phil]

Hi and welcome to the community!

That really sounds weird.

What if you import the file into Impress instead of Draw and try to save it there?
Also, why do you use Draw if the template is a .ppt file?

Depending on the line art that you mention, I suspect that some resampling is done by Draw (or OpenOffice in general) leading to the long save times.
But this is only a guess, as I could not reproduce the effect with my presentation files (.odp and .ppt).

Maybe you can make a sample file (without confidential information) available here?
The easiest way is to use some file sharing web site (e.g. mediafire).

KR, phil

[superdirk]

Hi Phil,

thanks for your attention.
If I save from Impress it is the same.
Actually the blue progress bar is finished soon but it takes a long time until the program is available again. Icons are greyed out during that time and other applications are slowed as well but the screen is updated. During this time there is strong hard disk activity and I just realized that available HD space decreases by ~250 MB but the system's pagefile does not increase.
I use Draw for the availability of styles and layers.
I have made the test file available here: "removed"
To make it smaller I removed nearly all TIFF files, but it is still incredibly slow in saving on my PC.
Thanks!

[Hagar Delest]

It takes less than 1 sec to save on my laptop (W2k, 1.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM).
Try to rename your OOo user profile (\Documents and settings\<user>\Application data\OpenOffice.org2), perhaps there is a damaged configuration file.

[superdirk]

Thanks Hagar,

I tried changing the profile name and a new one was created upon OO startup. However, this did not have an effect.
I now made the following obeservation: I copied all elements from the test file (in impress, ctl+c) into a new impress file (ctrl+v) and realized that this new file saves pretty fast. Of course, the copy procedure did not include the background. When I then selcected an impress background (the stone wall, I think) saving was very slow again. Upon removal of the background it again saved fast.
So somehow on my machine the background seems to cause the trouble!?
Any idea?
I should maybe add that I had problems with this .net MS framework thing a few months ago and it is currently not installed.
Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

I can't reproduce that. But there is something strange indeed with your background: I can't change it directly. I have to set the background to no fill, then it's blank and afterwards set another background. And after, it works fine to change again the background. But if I load your file and try to change it directly, no way.

How do you insert the background? By the Format>Page menu and Background tab?

[Phil]

Hi again,

Actually the blue progress bar is finished soon but it takes a long time until the program is available again. Icons are greyed out during that time

I can reproduce this behavior with OOo 2.3.1 on Win XP Pro SP2. However, on my machine (Pentium 4 with 3,4 GHz with 1 GB RAM) it takes only about 15 seconds.
I noticed that both processor activity is high during the non-responsive time. Also, both physical and virtual memory of the task soffice.bin are temporarily increasing heavily.
As you only have 512 MB of RAM, this would explain the difference. In your case, the system starts swapping, which delays the allocation of the virtual memory and explains the hard disk activity. The page file doesn't need to grow for this, the system just has to write quite a high amount of data to the hard disk.

OK, so far for the analysis of the problem.

But why does it happen, and why does OOo need that memory?

I have made a test by adding a bitmap background (via Format > Page > Background) to my own presentations, but I could not reproduce the effect.
As Hagar already asked, it's interesting to know how you actually add the background to the page or slide?

Or is this maybe a 2.4 issue (in creating the background) in combination with Windows?
Hagar, do you not see the memory usage effect? Did you test that under Ubuntu or Win2k?

I don't think the problem is connected to the .NET framework, as I can reproduce the behavior (and the .NET framework is OK on my system).

KR, phil

[Hagar Delest]

Still with my W2k system, soffice.bin process climbed to 390MB of memory with a 99% CPU usage for a short while. Note that I indeed see the blue line progress finish and then less than 3 sec non responsiveness.

[superdirk]

The background was from ppt, the cork thing.
Anyway, I can reproduce this behaviour with an OO background but ONLY when I increase the page size to eg. 1.4 m x 1 m (a Poster...).
I did the following:
open impress, create new file (presentation, screen size)
created a rectangle and a word of text
added stone background via right mouse klick on slide, page properties, bitmap et al.
then save: until here everything is fine, saves fast (although a lot of CPU activity)
now the important step:
I increase the page size via right mouse klick on slide, page properties, page, user defined et al. (I have the German version, so I do not know exactly what you see there) to 1.4 x 1 m.
now the background fills the whole page
if I save this file now without any further alterations it takes more than 1 min (plus ~250 MB swap) to save the rectangle plus text plus the background!
Is that specific to my machine?
Thanks!

[Hagar Delest]

OK, so just for fun, I set the page to 2x2m and this time it took more than 2 min to save a blank page with a background tiled, memory peak was at 625MB. The funny thing is that the file size is only 22kB!

[superdirk]

I didn't dare to try a blank page...
It seems impress/draw is temporarily rendering the whole page as a bitmap due to the many repetitions of the small background icons. Strange enough...
but at least it is not only my machine beeing weird.

[Hagar Delest]

Yes, perhaps you should file a bug report: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs, but that's not a so frequent situation I guess. As a workaround, keep your page without background and put it when you've finished.