Libreoffice impress hanging and high cpu on slide operations

[Guy Van Sanden]

Steps to reproduce:
- Create a presentation in libreoffice impress, 30-100 slides with or without images
- Add, copy or delete slides
- On those operations LO Impress hangs a lot; sometimes 5 mins or more
- Opening and saving works quick

Tested on 2 different laptops, both had the same issue. Both did have Intel Graphics, but different ones. It works fine on the same laptop with LO 5.1 on Ubuntu 14.04

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: libreoffice-impress 1:5.1.2-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-22.40-generic 4.4.8
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Mon May 23 12:55:08 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-04-29 (23 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
SourcePackage: libreoffice
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Claudio Arseni (claudio.arseni)]

the issue also affect Libreoffice Calc

[Charlie Thomsen (thomsec)]

My steps to reproduce:
-open pptx presentation
-modify text on any slide
-LO impress hangs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Guy Van Sanden, could you please attach a file that demonstrates this problem?

[Guy Van Sanden (gvs)]

Screenshot of top showing high cpu when copying 3 slides with only text. Impress screen dimmed and was unresponsive for 3 minutes. it can hang for 10 minutes like that.

Reproduced on 2 different laptops.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Guy Van Sanden, to advise, what was requested is the LibreOffice document itself be attached to this report (not a picture of top, something else, etc.).

[Guy Van Sanden (gvs)]

Hi Christopher

It happens on every single presentation, not a specific document, regardless of the presence of images.

When I open those files on Ubuntu 14.04 with libreoffice 5 from PPA or on CentOS it works correctly, even on the same model laptop.

Both affected laptops run Ubuntu 16.04 and have Intel graphics, though the model are over 4 years apart.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Guy Van Sanden:
1) Could you please advise which PPA precisely you were using when in Ubuntu 14.04?
2) In Ubuntu 14.04, did this problem happen with the default version (not PPA)?

[Guy Van Sanden (gvs)]

1) on my laptop it is ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-5-0, so LO 5.0 instead of 5.1
I have to check if any of them has 5.1 instead of 5.0.

2) I don't have any laptops with the original version, would have to reinstall it to test that.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Guy Van Sanden, I'm not able to reproduce the problem in 16.04 with the default LO version, but I'm using a SSD, which may skew the reproducibility.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Guy Van Sanden (gvs)]

I have tried it on two laptops with SSD and both have the bug.
I upgraded my own laptop yesterday, and got the bug also.

[Guy Van Sanden (gvs)]

For clarity, I have three different models of laptop, 1 with normal HD and two with SSD that have the ug.

Obvious commonality is Intel graphics

[Bernhard Schussek (bschussek)]

I experience the same bug on a Lenovo T450s with Ubuntu 16.04.

[brian (reilly-brian-m)]

I experience a similar bug on a Dell precision 7510 with Ubuntu 16.04. Not sure if it matters, but this laptop has an SSD and Nvidia M1000M graphics.

For me this happens mostly when adding slides and upon trying to save a somewhat large (>30 slides) slidedeck.

[Jesse McNichol (mcnichol)]

I had the same problem with Libreoffice Impress and it caused me no end of hassle until I uninstalled the GTK interface. Now it's fast and responsive even with big slideshows. Only drawback is that the menus look like Windows 95.

Try running "sudo apt-get remove libreoffice-gtk*" and see if that resolves the issue on your machine. This command will remove libreoffice-gtk, libreoffice-gtk3 and libreoffice-gnome but will leave libreoffice otherwise intact.

[Hernan Asorey (asoreyh)]

I can confirm that I experienced same problem in Lenovo i5 with 8GB RAM, running with up-to-date Ubuntu 16.04.01 using LibreOffice 5.1.4.2 10m0(Build:2). The problem was solved after remove libreoffice-gtk* as @mcnichol suggested.

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

So, going with the generic X11 backend seems to solve this. Can anyone of the affected test if they can reproduce this when having libreoffice-gtk installed, but not libreoffice-gtk3?

I other words, I am interested if this is reproducable with either just one of libreoffice-gtk3/libreoffice-gtk or with both.

[Frank Lind (fdlind)]

I've run into this consistently on a Lenovo i7 with 16GB RAM. Libreoffice 5.2.2-0ubuntu1~xenial0 from the libreoffice/ppa. Attempts to adjust memory sizes and object counts don't fix it. Removing allt libreoffice-gtk* works to fix the issue. I tried libreoffice-gtk3 and libreoffice-gtk2 individually and they each have the problem.

[rotten (rotten)]

I'm using 17.04 on a new Dell 7720 laptop (64G Ram, 8 Cores, M1200 Nvidia GPU, Enterprise grade SSD's, 17" monitor). This is also happening to me. Switching to look at my presentation with a slide show does not work. It just hangs. Sometimes if I press random buttons and mouse clicks, I'll suddenly find myself partway through the slide show, but I can't advance a slide or go back.

Escape gets me out of the presentation mode after minute or two.

I have not been able to view a single presentation in slideshow mode yet. I tried giving libreoffice more memory for image caching, but that didn't seem to do anything.

Am I to understand the workaround is to remove libreoffice-gtk3 and install libreoffice-gtk?

[rotten (rotten)]

Since libreoffice-gtk3 is a required package for libreoffice, it really wasn't clear how to swap it out with the older package.

I tried copying the .odt file to my macbook pro, where I installed the latest version of Libreoffice. The slide show worked, but it was completely mangled. Then I tried exporting it to pptx and opened that on my macbook with powerpoint. The slide show was much better.

In the end, I found importing the odt to slides.google.com worked the best. Although it requires a network connection, it just worked.

[Jesse McNichol (mcnichol)]

@rotten, libreoffice-gtk is not required for libreoffice to function. just do "sudo apt-get remove libreoffice-gtk*" and it should provide an easy workaround for this issue. takes all of 15 seconds so you can just reinstall later if you wish to get back the proper interface. I usually do this when I'm not making a presentation in libreoffice impress.

[Skelly (skelly33)]

@Jesse McNichol - removing libreoffice-gtk* as you suggested initially seems to have improved things for me; remains to be proven with more use, but my system (Ubuntu 16.04 on a Dell Precision M2800 with SDD, 8GB RAM) was running soffice.bin at 100% CPU utilization for varying durations, ranging from ~1 minute to ~45 minutes; the more brief durations were connected with simple LOImpress slide copy operations (this is NOT a complex deck, only a few MB, a handful of static images and bulleted text lists over 16 slides), and the longer were caused consistently by attempts to save changes. I did manage to verify that while in this state, the deadlock (or whatever it is) occurs BEFORE the actual save to disk operation, so you're hosed into waiting for it to clear itself if you don't want to lose your changes. Having just waited out my last important save operation (which did successfully complete finally), I tried your `apt-get remove libreoffice-gtk*`, restarted Impress with the same deck and made several small changes with no sign of the issue so far. I have copied slides, made several quick edits and save operations without any delay. Thanks for the tip!

[Rysiek (rysiekpl)]

We have been hit by the same bug. For us, it mainly affects Calc. Sadly, removing libreoffice-gtk* also removes libreoffice-gnome, which we rely on to have access to SMB-based resources in our internal network.

This is a show-stopper for us.

[pureblood (freeseek)]

Same problem with LibreOffice Impress version 5.3.1.2. Thank you @mcnichol for figuring out that removing libreoffice-gtk3 solves the issue. Does anybody know whether the issue persists with Ubuntu 17.10?

[Hossein (h-hossein)]

I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad (T460s), 8GB RAM with SSD. I am suffering from the same problem. It seems that it is worsening when the number of slides is growing. There is one more problem as well, which I am not sure if it is correlated to the hanging problem, which is a confusing undo operation. When I try to undo some steps, most of the times I am not able to recover the previous status. It is happening even when there only two to three steps of undoing. I even increased the memory in the memory options, but it didn't change anything, just it made things worse.

I did have this problem with ubuntu 14.4 and the previous version of liber, however, I didn't have the hanging experience very often.

[Hossein (h-hossein)]

Update on my previous report:

I have changed back the options for memory in libre impress to 20 MB but with each object restricted to 2 MB rather than the default which was 5.2 MB. It has been several hours working non-stop with libre impress without experiencing anything wrong.

It might be too soon to conclude, but I wanted to share it earlier, perhaps it would help.

[niniendowarrior (niniendowarrior)]

Just want to add insight that removing libreoffice-gtk* does make Impress usable. However, I run into issues where sometimes the graphical rendering of the UI and some of the edits are glitched and don't refresh correctly. This happens when I have the Impress window go maximize.