Words and large files

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

On Monday, 22 March 2021 11:24:28 GMT Pierre wrote:
> On Monday, March 22, 2021 9:01:21 AM CET Dag wrote:
> > Hi, opened the odf spec in words the other day.
> > This is a document with 800+ pages and a TOC of 60+ pages.
> > I did the same in LO to compare.
> > Don't take the absolute times too seriously as my box is well into its
> > teenage years.
> > But, I think comparison with LO says a lot:
> > 
> > Open: 2,5 mins, LO: 40 secs.
> > Except that TOC page numers is not shown (just ###), navigation, scrolling
> > etc works fine.
> > Save: 4 mins, LO: 30 secs.
> > 
> > And now to the bad part:
> > When a try to type a character words freezes for about 50 secs.
> > It seems the whole doc is re-layouted and also the TOC is updated (page
> > numbers appear).
> > 
> > Then when auto-save kicks in words freezes again without any feedback. I
> > expected to see a status meassage and a progress bar, but no.
> > 
> > Krita solved freeze by making a copy of the doc and save in the
> > background.
> > 
> > LO is better (but not good).
> > Generally you can type new text wo problems but it freezes for shorter
> > periods (maybe when updating page numbers), and it freezes when
> > auto-saving.
> > 
> > It never updates the TOC, this needs to be done manually.
> > 
> > Suggestions (just my 2 cents):
> > 1) TOC should be updated manually to avoid re-layout.
> > 2) Auto-save in the background.
> > 3) Minimize re-layout by e.g. only re-layout dirty pages before and
> > including the displayed page(s).
> 
> Hi
> 
> Thanks for bringing this topic back on the table, long time I did not try to
> do that. On my computer, opening with LO takes 4s, 20s with words… so about
> the same ratio as you have.

  i've got slowdowns at weird times while writing as well, which is one of the 
things i spent a bit of time on in the past, but obviously not enough (it used 
to be much, much worse).

> Since my last experiment in this topic, the performance analysis tooling has
> improved so much that this will be a fun thing to do. I'll see what this
> gives.

  They definitely have - attaching hotspot would be a highly interesting kind 
of exercise :) Also it turns out that intel vtune is now free (as in lunch, 
not recipe) on linux, and the time slicing analysis stuff in that thing is 
just outright amazing, and might also be worth a punt.

> And I completely agree with at least parts 1 and 3 of your conclusion. Can
> not tell for the second part, I must think a bit more about it.

  Auto-saving in the background isn't really causing me much trouble, but yes, 
it would very likely be worth the effort trying to backport Krita's work on 
the topic (it also, if memory serves, is a touch safer, in particular on 
Windows, but also just in general).

  All in all, though, as a general thing, there's not necessarily low hanging 
fruit here, but however far up the tree it is, it's definitely worth trying to 
pick it :)

-- 
..dan / leinir..
http://leinir.dk/