Writer docs with lots of formulas are slow to navigate

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#1

Documents with lots of formulas are incredibly laggy and almost impossible to work with due to lag. How can I make it so editing/viewing such documents isn’t painfully slow?

Using libreoffice-fresh 7.5.4-2 on Arch Linux (from the extra repository) on an SSD
Kernel: 6.1.35-1-lts
DE: KDE Plasma 5.27.6, Wayland
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (16) @ 4.37 GHz

Example document:
AppuntiAnalisi.odt (688.6 KB)

What I tried:

  • Opening the document in safe mode did not solve the issue, so I guess User Profile is not the issue in this case.
  • Opening the document on a VM with Gnome (kernel 6.3.9-zen1-1-zen) on X11, while not very fluid, scrolling does not freeze LO. So I guess the problem may be also limited to Wayland.
  • Opening the document with kernel 6.1.35-1-lts with Plasma on both Wayland/X11, scrolling causes LO to temporarily freeze (same issue as before)
  • Opening the document with kernel 6.3.9-zen1-1-zen with Plasma on a Wayland session, scrolling causes LO to temporarily freeze, while when using Plasma with X11 session scrolling is lower than normal but the document does not freeze.
#3

I have opened the document.
I can edit it easily, without any time delay. All thing is good.
My findings:

  • Language is Italian
  • The font used is “Fira Sans Compressed Book”. This font is not installed on my computer and has been replaced by its counterpart.
  • Pages 1, 2, 4 and 5 have content (total p. 1 to 5)
  • Page 3 is empty
  • On page 2 you work with empty paragraphs.
  • The formulas are inserted as OLE objects about 254 objects
  • They use the font uniformly, but the bold print is done as direct formatting in each case.
  • The status bar shows: 1165 words, 6542 characters.
    The many paragraph and character entries in the template control, may indicate that this file was once saved as a foreign format.

With me:

Version: 7.5.4.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 36ccfdc35048b057fd9854c757a8b67ec53977b6
CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19045; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: CL threaded

You may want to do your formatting with styles.

Professional text composition with Writer

#5

I don’t think this is a HW issue, as I’m using a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (16) @ 4.37 GHz.
All pages have content, so your “Page 3 is empty” may be related to you not having the font installed.
The font is not the issue, I changed the font to Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, Calibri and the lag when scrolling through the document is still the same.
Exporting the document in other formats, for example 2007-365 docx, while resulting in a lighter document (21.9Kb), does not result in better performance.

I see you are on Windows, I guess the issue could be related to some linux library LO depends on.

#6

Here LO 7.5.3.2 under Fedora 38, KDE Plasma
Your document opens without problem; scrolling speed as usual.
Substituted fonts cause a difference in formatted: page 3 partially empty comes from your manual page break. Since your document is totally direct formatted (no use of any paragraph or character style), you don’t benefit of automatic page sync/alignment. Direct formatting is felt to be “intuitive” by newbies but generally result in bigger documents and lower performance. Learn to work with styles. Direct formatting is the main cause of difficulties in achieving desired layout and leads you th hell when you want to modify your layout.

#7

I appreciate your input on the styles, but this is not the issue here, and the document itself is just notes took in class which then will have to be properly formatted on a new document.

I tried opening the same document on a VM with Gnome on X11 and, while not very fluid, scrolling does not freeze LO. So I guess the problem may be also limited to Wayland.

#8

I had to remove Wayland from my computer because my nVidia GPU, though quite powerful is becoming obsolete and seems to be incompatible with Wayland. Even nVidia doesn’t provide updates for its proprietary drivers (i.e. the last one available for my GPU has not the sufficient version number for Wayland). I reverted to Xorg but other problems come in the way. However, the system doesn’t freeze.

#9

My laptop runs on an AMD APU (RX Vega 8 as integrated gpu) so it uses mesa drivers, which have some issues on wayland with kernels above 6.1 (freezes at system level). But with 6.1.3-lts those do not happen. It could also be that the issue is related with mesa not working well with wayland with the latest kernel and hindering performance on LO. Still, when using the lts kernel on X11 the issue is still present, so it may not be related to wayland at all, and maybe only to the mesa driver.

#10

I think it is useful to enter the problem with all details on Bugzilla.

How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice.

Thanks.

1 Like
#2

I don’t know what HW you have, but your document has normal speed and it is fast in my computer.

You can try to reset your User Profile (Libre Office opens slow even on SSD! - #2 by KamilLanda)

#4

Opening the document in safe mode does not solve the issue, so I guess User Profile is not the issue in this case.

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