How can I improve/debug libreoffice's startup times

liboffuser2 · January 24, 2021, 8:39am

I am encountering very long (~35 seconds) startup times with libreoffice and want to improve these or find the cause of the bad performance.

My PC system is pretty fast as I bought it in 2020, so the hardware should not be the bottleneck.

To rule out user settings, I restarted in “Safe Mode” and choose:

Reset to factory settings
Reset settings…
Reset profile
Apply and restart
The restart itself did take very long (~35 seconds) again.

WRITER

Then I created a basic new writer doc. Save. Load doc. Good start/load time < 2 seconds.

CALC

Created a basic calc doc. Save. Load doc. Bad load time with the typical ~35 seconds.

WHAT NEXT

It seems like LibreOffice runs into some sort of timeout. What can I try next to solve/debug this issue?

Edit

Loading behavior

The splash screen loads fast, then the app window is shown with the windows title bar (with the generic libreoffice icon in the top left), but no other gui elements. After the 35s the calc title icon and all gui elements + content is shown.

SYSTEM SPEC
Version: 7.0.4.2 (x64)
Build ID: dcf040e67528d9187c66b2379df5ea4407429775
CPU threads: 16; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19042; UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: en-US
Calc: CL

anon73440385 · January 24, 2021, 8:50am

WHAT NEXT

Tell us your LibreOffice version and operating system including your desktop manager (if using a GNU/Linux distribution). Information from Help -> About LibreOffice might be very helpful (esp. for finding bugs already reported and problems already known).

anon73440385 · January 24, 2021, 9:05am

Thanks for the detail’s update.

Try to disable Skia in Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> View -> Category: Graphics Output -> Option: [ ] Use Skia for all rendering and check whether that fixes/mitigates your problem

liboffuser2 · January 24, 2021, 9:15am

Thank you for your help. Sadly, disabling Skia rendering did not changed the bad startup time.

mikekaganski · January 24, 2021, 11:19am

A timeout of ~30 s is very suspicious for some network timeout. Could there be some network connections configured on your system, and not accessible at the moment? Can you try with network explicitly disabled temporarily on your system, so that if something tries to access network, it will fail immediately and not wait for timeout?

liboffuser2 · January 24, 2021, 11:54am

@mike-kaganski You are right. Disabling the network helps as the startup time is then <2s. I have got a network printer which is turned off most of the time. OK, just checked the behavior with network enabled and printer turned on. Then, the startup time fast. SO… anything I can do regarding startup time for times the network printer is turned off?

liboffuser2 · January 24, 2021, 12:06pm

Thanks to @mike-kaganski I was pointed in the right direction. It seems the root cause for the hang/startup delay is that my network printer is turned off. Disabling the network card OR turning on the network printer “resolves” this issue.

Also, this bug is known for more than 9 years:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673

I don’t understand why LibreOffice’s Writer has no issues, just Calc!?

Thank you everyone for sorting things out!!

jilljenn · December 20, 2021, 11:02am

Thanks, very helpful.

keme · January 24, 2021, 9:40am

A couple of settings that “should not work” but sometimes they do anyway. If they do, it may indicate that something else is not optimally configured in your system. Startup time >30 sec, I’d guess the app is struggling to reserve RAM or there is a disk fault.

See the Tools - Options dialog.
Expand the top branch (LibreOffice) and select General.
Toggle use LibreOffice dialogs in the Save/Load dialogs section. Restart app. Any change?
Still in the Tools - Options - LibreOffice - General dialog, toggle the quickstarter setting. Reboot computer. Any change?

liboffuser2 · January 24, 2021, 9:51am

Tried both setting changed, but the issue is still there. To elaborate on the loading: The splash screen loads fast, then the app window is shown with the windows title bar (with the generic libreoffice icon in the top left), but no other gui elements. After the 35s the calc title icon and all gui elements + content is shown.