topic Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources. in Alfresco Archive

soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

imdea — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:39:54 GMT

Hello guys,I have alfresco 4.0.d installed in a Debian 6 box, but I'm getting some problems with a process called soffice.bin that seems to be eating a lot of cpu and memory resources.By some reason, it doesn't matter at what time I check the system resources comsumption via "top", there it is that

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

mrogers — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:04:31 GMT

Open office is needed by alfresco. It's quite normal for it to be working hard.

It's possible something has gone wrong for example repeatedly trying to transform a document which fails. There may be a clue in your alfresco log file.

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

imdea — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:12:24 GMT

Is it quite normal that it uses that amount of resources and that everytime no matter what time is it even if there aren't any user working on it, it be using 99% of my CPU?

wtf?

In my logs file there isn't anything anormal

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

digihorse — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:06:07 GMT

This is usually indicative of a problem with a newer version of an MS office document/spreadsheet, often with macros. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice just can't open the file to view it, and starts consuming process time trying. It is usually from someone doing a "view" on a suspect document. Stop Alfresco and kill the process. You can also just stop the openoffice with the alfresco/openoffice/scripts/ folder scripts. Updating the latest LibreOffice will help quite a bit. LibreOffice is a bit better behaved than OpenOffice in these situations.

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

imdea — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:54:08 GMT

Are you sure Alfresco works with "libreoffice"?

I have a Debian Squeeze server with Alfresco 4, and as libreoffice is not into Debian stable packages at the moment I installed a backport, but it seems that Alfresco doesn't like it, these is the error I got when starting up Alfresco:

2012-03-31 17:47:32,808 ERROR [management.subsystems.AbstractPropertyBackedBean] [main] Error auto-starting subsystem
net.sf.jooreports.openoffice.connection.OpenOfficeException: connection failed: socket,host=localhost,port=8100,tcpNoDelay=1; com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException
   at net.sf.jooreports.openoffice.connection.AbstractOpenOfficeConnection.connect(AbstractOpenOfficeConnection.java:77)
   at org.alfresco.util.OpenOfficeConnectionTester.testAndConnect(OpenOfficeConnectionTester.java:152)
   at org.alfresco.util.OpenOfficeConnectionTester.checkConnection(OpenOfficeConnectionTester.java:123)
   at org.alfresco.util.OpenOfficeConnectionTester.onBootstrap(OpenOfficeConnectionTester.java:96)
   at org.springframework.extensions.surf.util.AbstractLifecycleBean.onApplicationEvent(AbstractLifecycleBean.java:56)
   at org.springframework.context.event.SimpleApplicationEventMulticaster.multicastEvent(SimpleApplicationEventMulticaster.java:97)

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

sasquatch58 — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:01:49 GMT

I've successfully used LibreOffice in place of OpenOffice in Alfresco 3.4.d but I think the code that verifies that Open/LibreOffice is available is just a little too specific and will throw errors in the LibreOffice usage. Generally these are inconsequential so you might have other issues. Did you get it to work at all?
Cheers, Sasquatch

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

imdea — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 09:21:07 GMT

No, it gives me that error.

Maybe the Alfresco staff people could tell us a little more about whether this is possible?

I'm using Alfresco 4.0.d

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

digihorse — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:43:31 GMT

Yes, I'm sure that Libre Office works. I use OpenSuSE. What didn't work was changing the link to the OO bin in the configs. What did work was leaving the link, and creating a symlink from OpenOffice to the LibreOffice install, and then placing the alfresco openoffice start script in a new scripts directory under LIbre Office. Voila!

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

imdea — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:40:17 GMT

In theory it should be the same if I change the link of OO in the configs.

What I didn't understand well from your reply was this part:

and then placing the alfresco openoffice start script in a new scripts directory under LIbre Office

Could you explain it a bit more please?

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

digihorse — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:51:01 GMT

yes, in theory, it should work if you change the configs. In practice, I found that it generated errors. So, being a good linux admin, I just used symlinks instead, so that the application was none the wiser. In so doing, I'm doing an end run around anything buried inside the system that is failing to properly read the configs, because quite honestly, I don't have the time to do that debugging. I just need it to work.

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

ivallejo — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:38:00 GMT

I had this same problem, fixed using the suggestion here: https://forums.alfresco.com/forum/installation-upgrades-configuration-integration/configuration/sofficebin-has-cpu-pinned-100

As explained by pmcneil (whose only god-like post ever is fixing this OO problem), OpenOffice is trying to create a logo in X. Just disable it in the file sofficerc, which should be in

$ALFRESCO_HOME/libreoffice/program/sofficerc

If you have locate installed, run the command "locate sofficerc" to find it on your file system.

[root@dev-alfresco ~]# locate sofficerc
/opt/alfresco-4.2.f/libreoffice/program/sofficerc

Logo=0

My CPU usage for soffice dropped from 90% to 3%.
Before
PID USER      PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
9447 root      20   0 544m 13m 9892 S 99.8 0.7   9732:35 .soffice.bin

After
[root@dev-cgm-alfresco scripts]# ps auxww | grep office
root     20013 0.0 2.5 806228 49128 pts/0    Sl   14:24   0:00 /opt/alfresco-4.2.f/libreoffice/program/.soffice.bin –nofirststartwizard –nologo –headless –accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager

EDIT: Fixed the naming convention in one of my sentences. Thanks for TTownsend for the proper way to write it.

Re: soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

ttownsend — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 13:25:45 GMT

ivallejo is right, and I've seen this problem before, too. Setting logo=0 in $ALFRESCO_HOME/libreoffice/program/sofficerc is what I think I remember being my solution also.

There is also another option - I noticed that soffice.bin runs high after a large batch import of documents into the repository, and I recall that open/libreoffice is involved in conversions for indexing. This will happen when new docs arrive, but is should drop after all new docs are indexed. I observed that it does. I use Lucene for indexing, so I'm not sure if the same holds true for Solr.

Hope that helps!