Friday, June 25, 2010

OpenOffice Gurus?

So this week we deployed OpenOffice on 64bit Linux for the first time. It's smoking fast and works great especially under user loads; however it's chewing up LOTS of memory. It seems to be using easily 3 times more memory. I have been using lsof to check the documents that the users have open and they are nothing out of the ordinary and some of them are just a few pages with no images.

Anyone have any thoughts on this matter? Could it be leaking this badly? This type of memory usage is not sustainable; so I guess that means I'll have to start looking for it by process of elimination. Possibly it's user settings of some type. Very odd.

(top shot below shows memory usage).

4 comments:

Dave Richards said...

I think I have found something, just opening and closing documents is causing the memory footprint to grow. Sure looks like a leak to me.

Anonymous said...

If you suspect a memory leak, you might try running it under valgrind; the results should help a developer track down the leak. In particular, if the amount of memory leaked goes up if you open and close more documents before closing OO.o...

You might get more useful results if you have a build with debug information.

Anonymous said...

Have your tried modifying the memory object cache?

Tools Menu -> Options

Choose Memory

Possibly lowering the graphics cache or memory per object may help.

Dave Richards said...

Ok, it's a leak for sure. Moving in and out of documents while leaving the start center open grabs about 100Mb on each new documents...which is never released. Yikes. Sounds like a valgrinding day for me on Monday. :)