[ooo-build] Calc's marching ants bring Xorg to its knees - AA issue

I can't reproduce the highlighting type or issue you are talking about. Did you change your theme setup in some way to cause this to happen? Can you attach a screenshot showing what it looks like?

Thanks,

Chris

Hi Chris

I'm attaching some screen shots. I opened a new instance of Calc with an empty sheet and started top. First image is the normal situation, Xorg is using 5% of CPU. Next 2 images show a selected row and a selected column and Xorg using ~30% of CPU. Interestingly, if I make the Calc window wider the effect is worse (50% CPU), so it seems to be related to the number of ants.

As far as I know I have the default Human theme running with normal Compiz effects on a pretty standard intel GM965 graphics card.

Oh yes, I should mention that I make the selection then hit Ctrl+C to copy, that's when the ants turn up.

Thanks the copy is what appears to cause it.

It appears that this is an ooo-build issue not upstream.

Probably this bug is related to Impress's slow drag&drop operation. On my Ubuntu 9.10, drag&drop operation on Impress is extremely slow (e.g. moving a graphical object or a slide). In these operations, marching ants border with a couple of pixels wide is shown.

This is not just AMD64. Also happens to me on 32-bit PAE kernel. With and without Compiz, makes no difference. I observe both the slowdown with marching ants for copy in Calc, and the really slow drag & drop in Impress. Does drag & drop in Impress need a different bug submission, or is it another manifestation of the same problem?

Is anything happenening with this bug? I must say, it's quite hard to trace the Xorg's load back to openoffice. I wouldn't expect many people affected by this bug to actually come here and say "this affects me".

is there a workaround? maybe its possible to disable the animation?

Yes, for a workaround see bug #411542. I seem to be able to eliminate the marching ants slowdown here by turning off antialiasing as suggested there, so I suppose these two bugs are somehow related.

That's options -> openoffice.org -> view -> graphics output -> use anti-aliasing (uncheck)

Confirming cometdog's workaround works here too. I wonder whether this antialiasing issue relates at all to the failure of poppler / cairo to antialias some PDFs? ( bug 248355 )

This bug is still present in today's Lucid ISO.

I just experienced this bug also. It took me quite a while to connect connect "copying rows from open office" to "Xorg using 100% cpu". The workaround presented in bug#411542 seems to help a lot, but in lieu of a true fix, the ability to disable the marching ants animation entirely would be a perfectly acceptable solution in my opinion.

I can confirm that this is happening on OpenOffice 3.2 on Ubuntu 10.04. I notice that the bigger the copy selection the more CPU it uses. The disabling Anti-Aliasing in OpenOffice works for me.

I can confirm this happening on the following setup :
* Ubuntu 10.04, 64 bits, clean install
* OpenOffice 3.2
* Nvidia GPU with proprietary driver but NO Compiz

FIY: I am using the Sun/Oracle 3.2.1 OOo (vanilla OO) on Karmic 9.10. No marching ants anymore when copying.

I can confirm #19: vanilla packages work fine!

I have the same problem. 100% CPU on my dual p4-3200MHz while selecting and copyings some rows.

I really can't believe from 2009 this bug isn't solved !!! O_o

Sorry I forgot to specify: clean Ubuntu 10.04 on my HP Pavilion zd8000, compiz driver installed and working without any problem.

And, I don't have any "Graphics" option under "view" to select on: where can I disable those damn and unuseful ants? Why don't use a color instead? Really I don't understand those kind of stupid choices; tons of C code thrown away for such a stupid thing.

(found that option to uncheck aliasing: is not under "view", but under "Options" etc. as stated above. I saw another bug report with a wrong indication before.)

I confirm this bug is still present in Ubuntu 10.10 (32-bit, nvidia graphics).

I confirm this bug is still present in Kubuntu, I'm not sure how to know what version I'm running but the problem seems to have arrived recently, possibly in a recent update. Anyhow, disabling ant-aliasing does solve it. This should IMO be flagged as critical since it effectively cripples OOo until the workaround is applied.

I found disabling antialiasing and antialiasing for system fonts to be quite helpful.

Confirmed situation in Maverick/OO 3.2.1; disabling the anti-aliasing does help a lot, but still affecting overall performance, e.g. switching from the desktop with OO active is slower than usual.
In the confirmed situation, after selecting over 100 rows and two columns, X was using 100% of the 200% available(dual proc); OO became extremely slow while other apps would have to work on the other half of the processor power left. Besides that, my graphics card (nvidia GT9400) increased temperature by over 6 degrees C as compared to a normal working situation.
Usually software would not be able to kill non-mechanical hardware, but this may come close if left undetected.
Because not everyone is able to recognize the connection between the OO select-and-copy and all related issues commented upon here, this problem would have to be addressed quickly, imho...
By the way, for completeness: the correct path to disable the antialiasing:
(Main OO menu) Tools>Options>>>OpenOffice.org>View>>Graphics output>Use Anti-Aliasing (Uncheck this option)
This will restore a workable state as soon as clicking the OK button is processed.

Isn't it a duplicate of Bug #411542 or Bug #411542 is a duplicate of this bug?

I tried to connect this bug to openoffice bug tracker, but find many bugs of this kind and I'm not able to know which one to select.

A list of bugs of the same kind is available at : http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=cpu+anti+aliasing

[This is an automated message.]
There are no new official OpenOffice.org releases in Ubuntu packaging anymore => Won't Fix

If the problem persists, please mark this bug as "also affects project Libreoffice" or "also affects distribution Libreoffice (Ubuntu)" if that has not happened already.

Please leave references to upstream OpenOffice.org bugs in place to allow cross pollination.

No reference URL.

Unfortunately, this issue also exists in LibreOffice. I'm seeing the issue on 12.04 LTS 64-bit, running on my Lenovo T61, with NVIDIA graphics. The marching ants selection causes Xorg process to spin one CPU core at 100% usage. Clearing the marching ants (by typing in another cell or etc) returns CPU usage to normal.

Please let me know what other information you need.

Nathan Wittstock, please execute the following via the Terminal and feel free to subscribe me to it:
ubuntu-bug libreoffice-calc

Thanks!