Open of 500-page document brings system to a crawl, eventual freeze

In LibreOffice 6.1.3.2, whenever I attempt to open a very large document (500+ pages), the system slows to a crawl and eventually freezes. I was able to view the document by importing it into Google Docs, but even Google hung (never responded) when trying to download the file as a PDF.

I also tried converting the document to a PDF via:

lowriter --headless --convert-to pdf document.doc

But, I also had to kill that process after some time because it brought the system nearly to unresponsiveness.

I am running openSUSE Leap 42.3 with 16 GB memory. I understand that larger documents will require more memory, but am I missing some setting to use fewer resources to render a document?

You can download the document in question (24 MB), but be aware that opening it with LibreOffice may crash your system as well.

Well, it works fine for me - and I have for times less RAM than you on this particular machine. What might be the difference is I’m using 6.0.7.3 on Mint. You should try to upgrade do 6.1.5 and see what happens. If that don’t work, try 6.0.7. Maybe is something 6.1 specific. It’s not odt, but doc so who knows…

Have you tried allocating more memory to LibreOffice? Menu Tools → Options → LibreOffice → Memory. Under Image Cache try increasing the first two numbers in the list.

I can’t advise you on what might be appropriate to your particular operating system and LO version, but increasing each of those two numbers by about 50% worked for me.

Also in your case, increasing the amount of memory “per object” might help too.