Mac: beach ball ... beach ball ... beach ball

Another point to note when you “update the bugs site with whatever information I do find”. @hexadecagram seems to be able to repro and mentioned they intent to try to handle this. It possibly doesn’t make sense to add anything at this point, unless that’s really something ground-breaking.

Anyway: when there’s some problematic bug where there is some problem easily observable by some users, but devs can’t repro on their systems, it usually gives little to add “I see it by doing these steps”: more important is to find out the details of system/program configuration that is likely the reason why it is easily repro on some systems, and not on others (it could be locale, or installed system update packages, or programs running in parallel such as clipboard managers, or … hundreds of possibilities, but that is often the crucial piece that is making some bugs hang unfixed for decades without any hope, until one day, some developer happens by chance to come across such a constellation).

Hi all,

I have also disabled Java and it does seem to extend the time between beach balls.

It does seem to have something to do with autosave, BUT I have not had the same setting enabled as @jeshkhol (Preferences > Load/Save > General > Save AutoRecovery information every __ minutes). I recall seeing some leftover lock files in the past as well.

I also use Nextcloud and that was my first suspicion when I first encountered all this. Do any of you try to use documents stored in cloud filesystems? iCloud? Onedrive? Google Drive? Dropbox? Anything?

I’ve also found that some of the other programs I use in MacPorts have behaved strangely, seemingly due to my recent upgrade to Monterey. What versions of macOS have you seen LibreOffice problems with? For me, this first started to happen with certain versions of LO on Big Sur and now that I’m on Monterey, almost allversions of LO. Sound right to the rest of you?

If any of you have any files that would be useful for debugging you can email them to me directly at acc@hexadecagram.org. Please, however, to keep the conversation here so that we can all benefit. :wink:

I think you all deserve to know that my schedule is rather full at the moment so it’s likely going to be some time before any of my own code gets worked into the project but when I am through the initial training process with my mentor, I will be doing my best to make sure that LibreOffice continues to be the Mac office suite we all prefer!

Thank you @hexadecagram for your thoughts, and for attempting to solve this riddle once time allows.

To answer your questions: No, none of my LO files are stored in a cloud filesystem. Neither have I MacPorts installed.

There were occasional hangings/freezings before I had upgraded to macOS Monterey (I skipped Big Sur). However, with Monterey these problems – now occurring not daily, but several times an hour – have become so frequent that I fear most Mac users being faced with them will simply quit using LibreOffice.

It’s interesting that you mention Java. I have not disabled it yet for fear some tool I use would not work any longer. I use mainly LO Writer and LO Calc, and I rely on regular expressions a lot (such as \p{Punct}). I don’t use the command line. Do you think it would be safe to disable Java? (Regrettably, I fail to understand anything written here: Development/Java - The Document Foundation Wiki)

A user-oriented overview is in FAQ.

Thanks, but this link takes me not to an FAQ page but to Bugzilla – Enter Bug: LibreOffice

@mikekaganski I think your point about configuration is good, but aside from version of software and system, what do you think are the pieces needed.

as a start:
Version: 7.2.6.2 / LibreOffice Community Build ID: b0ec3a565991f7569a5a7f5d24fed7f52653d754 CPU threads: 16; OS: Mac OS X 10.16; UI render: default; VCL: osx Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US Calc: threaded

Should I send the hang reports to the bug site or to @hexagram.

@ksdavidc I can’t speak for @hexadecagram; nor do I use macOS myself (so I can’t know what could be really useful here). What I wrote here was just a word of caution to consider when you want to add things to a bug that affects many, and thus may easily become cluttered with “me-too”-like comments, or with steps basically repeating what is already known. These comments do not enhance the bug report, but make it more difficult for a developer to understand it. Use my warning with a common sense, not as something universally applicable. And feel free to ignore my words if you are unsure if they make sense in a specific case - it’s better to add something duplicating than to avoid adding something really new.

Always send things publicly to the bug tracker - that allows the data to help developers later even if some developer would not succeed. (I wish @hexadecagram to succeed wholeheartedly!)

I am having the same problem. see here: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148829#add_comment

In my case the program is effectively unusable. Also tried installing older and beta versions, to no avail.

How can this be troubleshooted to find out why it is happening?

ksdavidc –

You are not alone.
Over on the forum for Keyboard Maestro there are two threads about LibreOffice crashing in similar ways.

In the first thread below, the developer of Keyboard Maestro actually did troubleshoot and he posted a report of problems found.
But since cause of problem is LO, no solution possible from outside.

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thanks. I am not really skilled enough to even understand all that is happening in those threads, but as I use it I am saving often and just trying random things from time to time and trying to figure out what the trigger might be. I can’t consistently reproduce the behavior but it is is persistent. FWIW it seems to be going a little better now, after installing 7.3.3.2, but not entirely gone.

I just realized I posted as an answer, when I really meant to just add a comment. Sorry. I couldn’t find the reply button, and the answer button was so prominent…

@Marcus_SC mentioned that OpenOffice runs flawlessly on his system. Did you, @ksdavidc, run OpenOffice on the same system any time before installing LibreOffice?
Related question to @mikekaganski : Does the LibreOffice installer read the OpenOffice profile when there is no LO profile availlable? I suspect that LO imports some inconsistent configuration setting(s) from OpenOffice.

No. The installer does not read any profile at all, including LibreOffice’s. The profile is a user configuration thing, that is only created and used by LibreOffice (OpenOffice) itself, not by its installer (and the latter would be impossible at all, given that installation could be performed using a different account compared to the one used to run LibreOffice).

What installed reads/considers is installer information (MSI in Windows case), where there is a list of “older package identifiers” allowing the new package to detect prior installations, read their install sets (which allows to configure own install set to match older install set), and uninstall those older installations prior to installing itself.

But … it is all about Windows. Here we are talking about macOS, where installer is even simpler, not having even install sets …

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