I was sent a MS document docx file and I opened it for editing using LibreOffice Writer (LibreOffice 5.1.5.2 10(Build:2)) on Fedora 24 (x86_64). The problem is it is unresponsive from the beginning, so that I cannot even scroll down the page. Touching the window results in a prompt telling me to “Wait” or choose to “Force Quit”. Interestingly, waiting did not solve the problem, and to my surprise, I faced a grown RAM usage in System Monitor, where LibreOffice was occupying 7.1 GB of my total 8 GB RAM! Soon, the system closed LibreOffice.
While I have never encountered such a thing anytime before, and thinking this might an MS issue, I resorted to converting the file via soffice commandline options as follows to ODT format:
[mhd@localhost sepehri-95]$ soffice --convert-to odt tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.docx --headless
convert /home/mhd/Dropbox/sepehri/sepehri-95/tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.docx -> /home/mhd/Dropbox/sepehri/sepehri-95/tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.odt using filter : writer8
[1]+ Done libreoffice tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.docx
Next, I tried opening the resulting odt file, but the same problem happened for LibreOffice, making it unresponsive and consuming huge RAM.
Any comments on what this is all about and how it can be dealt with?
P.S.
A new experiment is that running conversion to DOC file type using the following command has the same RAM blowing effect:
[mhd@localhost mm]$ soffice --convert-to doc tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.docx
convert /mnt/mm/tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.docx -> /mnt/mm/tsunami-fazel-Thu040695.doc using filter : MS Word 97
^C
So, I have to kill the process to save the system from freezing.