soffice.bin process using a lot of resources.

[imdea]

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 process "soffice.bin" using a lot of resources, even if Alfresco doesn't have any users working on it.

This is a top output:

top - 11:37:15 up 18 days, 15:28,  1 user,  load average: 1.00, 1.01, 1.00
Tasks:  74 total,   2 running,  72 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 83.7%us, 16.3%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2093716k total,  1944732k used,   148984k free,   245608k buffers
Swap:  1048568k total,    23284k used,  1025284k free,   843380k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                           
32395 root      20   0  111m  33m  29m S 99.3  1.7   2866:32 soffice.bin                                                                                                                                       
 7788 root      20   0  2460 1140  892 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.03 top                                                                                                                                               
32291 root      20   0 1197m 696m 8832 S  0.3 34.1  11:19.41 java           ‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

If I comment the OO path location into alfresco-global.properties it's ok, that process doesn't run but then I have some problems with other operations (I guess it's because Alfresco can not access documents metadata).

What could I do? I've been experimenting this problem since alfresco 3.2 and is driving me crazy, it's slowing down my server and my users are complaining a lot about that.

Thank you very much

[ivallejo]

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

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.

[ttownsend]

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!