New install of OpenOffice.org is very slow to open

[eeprom]

Hello,
I recently installed OO version3.0 onto a computer using windows XP professional (SP3). All the OO programs work. But when I open Writer or Calc, it takes almost 30 seconds to open. But once a file has been opened and then closed, then all other files open at a normal speed. It's like there is some initialization which takes place when the first file is opened.

Can anyone tell me what's going on with this?

thanks

[Hagar Delest]

Try to reset your OOo user profile. But during the welcome process, don't transfer your personal data, former configuration files might corrupt the new profile.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[eeprom]

Thanks. I will try resetting the user profile when I get home. I have the exact same problem with Calc. I suppose I should also reset the user profile in that program as well. If this fixes it I'll be sure to post a [Solved].

[Hagar Delest]

It is the same profile for all the OOo modules, see the other posts of the user profile tutorial.

[bhmt]

But once a file has been opened and then closed, then all other files open at a normal speed. It's like there is some initialization which takes place when the first file is opened.

Maybe ... are you not using the "quickstarter"? That preloads some of OpenOffice.org at system (computer) startup, so when you actually go to open a document it's a bit faster.

If it is "on" you'll see a blue openoffice icon in the system tool tray (down near the clock).
If not, go to Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Memory .. Tick the box to have it run on computer startup. (You won't see it until you reboot)

But even with it, I think the second document I open opens quicker...might be my imagination.

[eeprom]

I have checked the openoffice quickstarter and it is enabled. I changed the user profile, and then went through the welcome screen. I then re-booted the computer and tried to open Writer. It took more than 30 seconds to start Writer. I closed Writer and then opened another document. It took 3 seconds to open the second document. There has got to be something wrong. Any ideas?

[Hagar Delest]

What is your hardware? I've an old laptop at home and it takes time to launch the first time but then, OOo is kept in memory for a while and if you open a document afterwards, it loads much more faster since the application is still in memory.

[eeprom]

The computer is about 6 years old. I don't know the processing speed off hand, but it is not nearly as fast as newer systems. But the start up time is far too long to be caused by processing speed. When Writer is first called to open, there is enough time to go to the fridge, pour a glass of milk, grab a few cookies, and still get back in time to watch the document open. I haven't timed it, but it's got to be longer than 30 seconds. This is not a "delay"; this is a malfunction. And as I said, once any document has been opened, I can open any other document in a normal amount of time. There is some initialization which happens on the first document. Why doesn't this get taken care of during start-up?

[acknak]

Hello,
I already posted this in the Writer forum, but I haven't found a solution yet...

I have OO on a desktop running XP professional. When I first open an OO document or calc sheet, it takes a very long time to open, 30 seconds, maybe more. I have the quickstarter icon in the system tray, so I figure that this function is on. I have tried changing profiles--no difference. Also, once I have opened a document, then all other documents open normally. The same is true for calc sheets, once the first one has been opened, the remainder open normally. It seems that a start time of 30 seconds or more is malfunctions of some type. Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this?

thanks

Please don't make duplicate threads; it won't help get an answer any faster.

I marked your other thread to be removed and moved this thread to "Setup and Troubleshooting".

[Pozzie]

Hi

I'm new here and I see the thread stopped in January.

I have the same problem, very slow startup (the blue rapid start icon is visible). If I try and open a doc or a spreadsheet, it takes about 30-40sec. Most of the time seems to be getting the framework up and running, then at the very end, the doc loading is quite fast.

I saw the benchmarking article - which was very impressive, but that was about a 4-7sec start on linux, so not really relevant.

I am on XP Pentium 4. I recently upped the memory to 1Gig in the hope of improving but no use.

Any advice welcome. Is there any test I can run in case the computer is bunged up with rubbish?

[TheGurkha]

First time start-up can be slow. But subsequent starts should then be faster (until the next time you reboot your PC, when the first one again can be slow). Or are you saying all start-ups of OOo are slow, not just the first one?

[eeprom]

I just doubled the ram on my machine to see if it would make a difference in opening open office. No difference. It still takes so long that by the time it does open I often forget that I had even tried to open it. I can't believe that I'm the only one with this problem. I don't think I should have to buy another computer so that I can run open office. And yes, it does load fine the second time. But the first time is an unacceptable delay. I would be grateful for any suggestions which might speed this up.

thanks.

[RoryOF]

This is the way it is. The first startup is slow, subsequent startups are much faster. There is no fix.

Edit: one suggestion which might speed things up a little is to defrag your disk drive. This is good housekeeping in Windows and should be done regularly anyway. Not necessary under Linux, they suggest.

[eeprom]

Rory,
First of all, the computer in question is in good condition. I do frequent defrags, and I manually clean junk off every so often. The computer run well (normally) for all other programs. I cannot say I have ever noticed how long it take to open OO onother computers, so I don't have a sense of the typical opening time. But, let me give you an idea of how my typical start up goes.

1. Click on OpenOffice Icon
2. Nothing happens at all. No hour glass, no response. Task manager doesn't even pick it up.
3. 15-20 seconds later there is no indication that anything is happening.
4. By this point I sometimes forget that I have tried to open the program and so I click on the icon a second time.
5. Nothing happens, 25 seconds later.
6. 30-40 seconds later both instances of the program open up.

Please let me know, is this typical? If it is then I can quit trying to fix it.

[acknak]

I could be wrong, but I think OOo's startup time is limited by access to files on the disk, and loading the large application library files that make up the program. That would explain why adding RAM doesn't help, if the limitation is disk/file i/o speed.

OOo also does make some connections to the Internet when it starts. Network access is a great place to see long delays.

On Linux, OOo opens or touches over 3000 different files and spawns about 25 separate processes, just in starting the software. For me, OOo typically takes 8-10 seconds for a cold start and less than half that for a warm start. For some reason, it does seem to take longer when I have to use it on Windows, and I have seen it take 30 seconds on an older PC. I imagine that security software checking all those file accesses could account for the difference.

You can learn FMTYEWTK, starting here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Performance
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/ach ... tter_start
http://www.oooninja.com/2009/03/multipl ... rk-30.html

[RoryOF]

On my machine (3600+ dual core, 4 GB, Win2k SP4) on first open it takes 16.5 secs to open the OO splash screen, and from that 11.5 secs to open a new Write file. Afterward it takes 1.5 secs to open the splash screen and 1.5 secs further to open a new Write file.

As acknak says it seems faster in Linux (Ubuntu) on a lesser powered machine.

One possibility is that it is being slowed up by your virus scanner checking all those files on open.

[lmc-79]

I am having the same issue of VERY slow start-up and file opening. Has anyone found the solution to this yet? I noticed that these posts were from 2009. Whenever I start up Open Office, the first time it starts it takes 4 minutes before a file opens. After the first file opens, the next files open quickly. It doesn't matter if it is a new document, a saved ODF or a saved Microsoft document. As long as I don't close out of Open Office the subsequent files open normally. As soon as I close Open Office, the first file takes 4 minutes again. I have reset and deleted the user profile several times, uninstalled and reinstalled version 3.2, have tried having the Quickstarter both enabled and disabled. I frequently clean-up and defrag my hard drive. I am on a network at work and all the other computers on the network open Open Office documents quickly. At home, I have the same issue. All other documents for other programs (including Microsoft Office), internet browsers, and network open normally both at work and at home. I have compared the option settings on my laptop to the other computers at work that work normally and there is no difference in my settings compared to the other computers. I have tried all the listed solutions with no luck. Is there any solution or do I have to "plan ahead" to make sure that I open Open Office and keep it running in the background? I am a teacher in a school and use Open Office with my students. Any help would be appreciated
I have a Lenovo laptop with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo Centrino processor, 3 GB RAM, and 230 GB Hdd running Win XP Pro, SP3.

[RoryOF]

Are you running a virus scanner? A quick inspection on my Win2K system shows that OpenOffice comprises 4000+ files. It is possible that a virus scanner is checking such files on access, causing your delay. I suggest, if you have a virus scanner, that to test you disconnect from the Internet (for safety), disable your virus scanner, and try a startup under those conditions. If that speeds up your startup then perhaps a solution might be in sight.

On my machine, which is no longer (never was!) "State of the Art" it takes about 16 secs for OOo to start up first time; faster would be great, but this is liveable with. 4 mins is too slow!

[lmc-79]

I am running Norton Internet Security and yes, I have tried disabling the anti-virus and the firewall and it makes no difference in Open Office start-up time

[thomasjk]

Update to V3.2. File opening is much faster.

[lmc-79]

I am using OO 3.2.0 according to my About Open Office (OOO320m12 - Build:9483)

[RoryOF]

I am running Norton Internet Security and yes, I have tried disabling the anti-virus and the firewall and it makes no difference in Open Office start-up time

My experience with Norton (some years ago) was that it was an absolute pig and tried to take over my computer (and latterly McAfee was similar). So I deleted it entirely and use AVG Free as anti-virus on my Windows machines. One of my complaints against it was that it was so hard to disable for debugging purposes. One thing you might do is Open Task Manager, select the Processes Tab, and see if you can detect which process is consuming processor cycles when you try to open OOo. This might give you a clue to where the problem lies.

[lmc-79]

The only process that jumps to the top of the memory usage list is soffice.bin, the symantec (norton) process changes, but not significantly. At first glance, none of the other processes seem to change (I will do a more detailed comparison later). The System Idle Process changes from 99 CPU to a 50/50 split with soffice.bin. No other process seems to grab CPU.

[RoryOF]

There have been occasional reports of multiple instances of soffice.bin (and/or soffice.exe) running as processes. If you click on the header of the processes windows the running processes sort into alphabetical order, which makes it easy to see if there are multiple occurrences of these processes. If there are, they need to be tracked down and their cause removed.

[RoryOF]

There is some discussion on OOo slow start-up at
http://open-tube.com/an-explanation-on- ... le-loading
and at
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19447

This latter discussion suggests adjusting memory settings (note:you may need to restart OpenOffice after this - best to restart entire computer, perhaps) and it also refers to OOo needing to kick the printer on start-up (the note is some 5 years old, so may be outdated, but still worth trying). Do you have a local printer installed and set as default?

Edit: Other postings suggest reducing the number of Undo steps from 100 to (say) 20 or 10, which seems reasonable to me, as I can never remember what I did 100 steps ago. Also, there are suggestions that Java can cause the slowness, and that you might disable Java use in OpenOffice (also adjustable in Tools / Opions)

[arman0]

I had a similar problem in that it would take several minutes for each new document to open (v3.2.1 on WinXP). When I removed extraneous Windows printers and set the default printer to XPS Document Writer, the problem went away.

[elek]

I had a problem that OO 3.2.0 opened documents very slow (>30secs).

Solution was an entry in "/etc/hosts":
127.0.0.1 hostname.(none)
where "hostname" should be your hostname.

OO tries to resolve that hostname when opening documents?!?!?
check' it out with:
$ sudo tcpdump -nnl -i eth0 -s 1536 dst port 53

Could not find an answer, WHY OpenOffice does it.

[swingkyd]

So does anyone know what might be the solution to 3-5 minute file loading on Windows 7? The linux solution is nice but I wouldn't know what to do for Windows 7.

[swingkyd]

So does anyone know what might be the solution to 3-5 minute file loading on Windows 7? The linux solution is nice but I wouldn't know what to do for Windows 7.

I guess for me it was the default network printer server was asleep so therefore I could not be found so therefore we cannot open the OOo.org file.
That seems odd that one would have to have an active printer connection to load a file.

[Hagar Delest]

See that similar one: [Solved] System slow downs is it network related?