openoffice startup time & nautilus memory leak

[mpolo]

I am currently experimenting with Fedora with some less computer-savvy persons and have run into a couple of problems. Firstly, there is the complaint about the ridiculously long startup time on OpenOffice. I know that this is because it is not preloaded by the operating system on boot, but what am I supposed to tell a computer newbie? The fact is that a Celeron running FC4 (default configuration) with 768 MB RAM takes over a minute to open OpenOffice, while a Pentium II with 256 MB RAM (if that) takes about 20 seconds to open Word. I'm considering starting OOo on boot, so that the time is disguised by lengthening the boot time, and asking the users to leave the applicatoin open on the desktop to avoid repeated startup time problems, but is there anything else I can do?

Also, a user left Nautilus open on the desktop (two windows pointing to SMB shares), and within about 5 hours, it was consuming on the range of 680 MB of RAM and was really thrashing on the swap space, grinding the computer to a standstill. Any suggestions on how to prevent this? (Other than instructing the user to shut his windows...)

[mpolo]

I created a partial solution to the first problem. I put this perlscript into my Preferences>Advanced Preferences>Sessions as a startup program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

while (1) {

  if (not grep {/soffice\.bin/} `ps ax`) {
    sleep 5;
    # give the process time to end...
    system("/usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice.bin -nodefault -nologo");  }
}

I called it oooql.pl, but anyone using it is welcome to use another name... It doesn't seem to use up much processor time and memory.

For those who are unfamiliar with Perl, this just runs the soffice.bin binary with the options -nodefault and -nologo, which cause OpenOffice.org to load up with no splash screen and without opening writer. With this in memory, starting up an OO component takes about 7 seconds on the Celeron and about 3.5 seconds on a P-IV... Hope someone finds it useful.

One caveat: if you close OpenOffice and then re-open immediately, you may get a conflict that is reported as an OOo bug. So don't close just to immediately reopen... (After 30-60 seconds there should be no problem.)

[mpolo]

This program fails to work with the latest update-realeased to openoffice.org (1.9.125-1.1.0.fc4). Here is a working version:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

while (1) {

  if (not grep {/soffice/} `ps ax`) {
    sleep 5;
    # give the process time to end...
    system("/usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice -nodefault -nologo");
  }
}

[wt6g]

I have experienced the same problem of memory consumption by Nautilus. Running FC8 64 bit version. It slowly takes over all of my memory. No idea why, and it does not need to be open.

If I had to guess I'd say there's a problem with PDF files somehow when it attempts to display them since I'm doing a lot of work with PDF files and I've got a hunch if you have some on your desktop the display of the icon can trigger a problem that does not get resolved, but that's just a guess. I'm going to do some more testing, but right now I'd say this is a very severe problem.

/Len