LibreOffice Extremely Slow in Mac OS Sierra

I see the problem on a Macbook with a second screen, but not an IMac using just the internal screen. Maybe this relates to the Mac screen focus switching?

The behavior is the same whether I am using the MacBook Pro without an external monitor or with an external monitor. Also, we have a new iMac and it has the same problem.

How much memory do you have allocated? Menu> Tools Options LibreOffice Memory Try increasing it. Not sure it will fix issues, just something to look at. (How much memory do you have on your box? Is it system memory, or a SD card?) … Can you look at your processes and see how much of the CPU LO is using? Is it mostly just waiting, or is it grinding on the CPU hard?

Same issue here. MBP 13" Late 2013. Mac OS Sierra 10.12.3. LO 5.3.1.2 build e80a0e0fd1875e1696614d24c32df0f95f03deb2.

Hi there, Unfortunately what I see here is a typical unix person answer, asking to reset things, play with parameters, some shell commands…an so on…

The bottom line is. I just freshly installed Sierra on a formatted drive. Freshly installed a fresh copy of libreoffice… UNWORKABLE… period. I am not going to try things until you folks who are dealing with programming fix it. Do not suggest me a get around. İmplement it in a software fix.

I am a cs professor 50 yrs old, 30yrs unix user

I have installed LO 5.3.2.1 on my MBA 2011 running Sierra 10.12.3. This is a new SSD, new install of Sierra. Accessing files on hard drive only. Only using Writer and files are not large. Every few minutes of use results in program freezing, and CPU is exceeding 100% for 3 or minutes at a time. Tried resetting user profile (as outlined above), increasing available memory to the program. Have to revert back to earlier version of LO. Until fixed this problem should be noted on download site.

Under “Resolving Corruption” )LibreOffice user profile - The Document Foundation Wiki)
“Many problems in LibreOffice can be caused by corruption in the user profile. When noticing strange behavior in LibreOffice the first thing to do is to reset the user profile. To do so, follow these steps:”…this section does not even really explain how to reset the profile.

Isolate your doc styles “applied styles”. select each one 'modify…" and make sure you’re not using proportionate scaling. Try 1 lines to test. Under line spacing part of indents and spacing. I just figured this out and had to share it!!!

Which versions of LO are you using? Your advice is not relevant to Mac OS 10.11.4 and LibreOffice 5.4.0.3

Hi there, Unfortunately what I see here is a typical unix person answer, asking to reset things, play with parameters, some shell commands…an so on…
The bottom line is. I just freshly installed Sierra on a formatted drive. Freshly installed a fresh copy of libreoffice… UNWORKABLE… period. I am not going to try things until you folks who are dealing with programming fix it. Do not suggest me a get around. İmplement it in a software fix.
I am a cs professor 50 yrs old, 30yrs unix user

In my case, the sluggish speed was indeed related to an external monitor being attached and mirrored.
After disconnecting the external monitor and restarting LO, it was drastically faster.
LO 5.2.5.1, Mac OS X 10.10.5 .

ubiquitous spinning wheel with every function with LibreOffice 5.3.1.2 on Mac Sierra 10.12.5. Going back to Open Office which outperforms LO on speed.

I also found that the solution is to install Open Office which does not have the general slowness issue. I am running macOS Sierra 10.12.6 on a MacBook Pro Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013, 16GB of RAM, no external monitor.

I hope the LibreOffice team will address this problem as I would like to support them.

Allocating more memory to LibreOffice fixed the performance issue for me on around one dozen Mac OS Sierra machines:

  1. In the LibreOffice Menu go to LibreOffice > Preferences (on Windows and Linux go to Tools > Options)

  2. In the Options dialogue window choose LibreOffice > Memory

  3. Allocate more memory, for instance:

Image Cache:

Use for LibreOffice: 1'024 MB

Memory per object: 64.0 MB

Remove from memory after: 00:30

Cash for Inserted Objects:

Number of objects: 100
  1. Of course the amount of memory you can allocate to LibreOffice is limited by the RAM available on your box. So you might wanna find your optimal configuration by testing different memory settings.

  2. Mac OS Sierra needs significantly more RAM than older Mac OS versions. If your box has less than 8 GB RAM available then consider upgrading to 8 GB.

Hopefully this will work for you too!

@RogerPaul wrote: “1) In the LibreOffice Menu go to Tools > Options

If you have a Mac system or if you know it you should know that there is nothing in Tools > Options.
You have to go to LibreOffice > Preferences.

You’re right, the navigation path is platform-dependent:

On Mac OS Sierra go to Menu > LibreOffice > Preferences > LibreOffice > Memory

On Windows & Linux go to Menu > Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Memory

this is one of the best answers to a question I have ever seen. You are clear about what needs to be done and don’t assume that the reader is a computer guru with special knowledge. thank you.

I have this problem. I’ve found the workaround described here works for me.

Summary: Launch directly from executable within the application archive (/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice for me).

If this is indeed a memory allocation problem (i.e. the default memory allocations are too small) then the developers should fix this by coming up with an algorithm that allocates memory in a way that gets good performance in most cases. Granted, it won’t be easy, but it should be possible to look at the amount of memory in the system and then make an educated guess at the amount of memory that should be allocated.

FWIW I am currently trying the memory allocation adjustments recommended in an earlier post by Roger Paul and they seem to be helping. I’m just saying this is a lot to ask of average users.

I’ve been working with computers since the mid 60’s and while I thought paging might be the cause of the problem, I had no idea that LO had default memory allocations set. If it weren’t for this forum, I wouldn’t have figured it out. If I couldn’t figure it out, how is the average user going to figure it out?