Typing and scrolling lag in LibreOffice due to gtk3

[NathanZachary]

Hello all,

I did a system update, and am now using LibreOffice 5.4.0.3 with Xorg 1.19.3 and nvidia-drivers 384.59-r1. When typing in any LibreOffice application (Writer, Calc, et cetera), there is a fairly extreme lag and I've noticed that the ol' /usr/bin/X process spikes one full processor core (similar to the problem that I mentioned in this thread). I've also seen that the menus hang. For instance, in Writer, if I go to Table --> Insert (causing the pop-out menu to appear), that menu won't go away until I click somewhere else within the window.

[NathanZachary]

Nobody else is seeing these problems? I'm thinking that they're related to nvidia as I don't experience them on my laptop which is running a similar set of packages but using the intel graphics drivers.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[NathanZachary]

I've found that it seems to be related to GTK3. If I start LibreOffice with:

[dantrell]

[NathanZachary]

You're welcome.
I just recompiled with "-gtk3" and the problems I had before are gone.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[NathanZachary]

Just wanted to update this thread because there is a bit of a change with LibreOffice >=6. The USE flags appear to have changed with this release:

[asturm]

Hm, sooner or later you should figure out why gtk3 performs that bad on your systems. The time of the legacy gtk2 frontend is limited.

[NathanZachary]

I don't know that this is directly related to my system or solely to GTK3. I think that it is the combination of LibreOffice and GTK3:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101189#c12

I agree that it would be best to find out the root cause, but it happens on multiple systems for me (desktop with nVidia, laptop with Intel graphics, et cetera). The comment linked above forces LibreOffice to go back to using GTK2, and that fixes the problem each time.

If you have any suggestions to further diagnosing, I would be happy to try them. I've also noticed that GTK3 works just fine with many applications other than LibreOffice.

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

Did you already switch on/off hardware acceleration and/or anti-aliasing in the preferences? Is it still slow typing or only scrolling now (could also be input driver related)?

[NathanZachary]

Yes, I tried combinations of those settings. For now, it seems like GTK2 is my only usable option. I will have to investigate further once it is deprecated.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

Well, it is deprecated in >=6, to be dropped at some later point.

[NathanZachary]

Wonderful. Then I guess I will just have to drop GTK support, and deal with it being even more ugly than it is now. At least it will be usable.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

I thought before you wrote on your laptop with Intel graphics you do not have that problem?

[NathanZachary]

You're definitely right. I had forgotten that the issue didn't manifest itself with the Intel drivers. I will have to check to make sure that's still the case (likely so) on my laptop. It takes quite some time to compile on my laptop, so when I get to it, I'll respond on this thread. That being said, maybe it is somehow related to the combination of LibreOffice, GTK3, and the nVidia BLOB.

Sorry for mistakenly saying it impacted the Intel drivers as well.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

Do you have TripleBuffering enabled or disabled?

I have been avoiding Nvidia GPUs like the plague so I am not of much use here, but just recently someone reported in IRC they greatly improved their system performance by triggering that option (one way or the other I don't know).

[NathanZachary]

Not sure yet whether or not it helped with LibreOffice and GTK3, but it certainly provided some improvement with the tearing that I was experiencing in Chromium. Thanks for the suggestion!

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[NathanZachary]

After trying many different approaches, I'm still left with GTK2 as the only method of getting LibreOffice to function at a usable speed. When typing in a somewhat large Calc sheet using GTK2, it is responsive. When I recompile using GTK3, there is a 3-4 second delay between when I type each character and when it appears. Whilst typing, I see that one process is consuming a full 100% of a single processor core:

[jssilva]

I confirm problem in LO 6.0 on scrolling with touchpad. I recompiled with -gtk gtk2 and problems are gone.

With gtk3, the scrolling was almost impossible, very sluggish, very fast upwards and very difficult downwards, or was it the reverse? I really can't be certain. External mousewheel operated correctly though.

Context menu was also impossible to get on the want cell (calc). As soon as I placed my two fingers on the touchpad, the sheet would slide on the faster speed direction; again, I'm not certain which this was. Sometimes, if I had my two fingers steady on the touchpad, the sheet would slowly slide sluggish and continuously.

[NathanZachary]

Years later and now that GTK2 is no longer supported, my only option to keep LibreOffice usable is to disable GTK completely.
With the GTK flag enabled, the lag is so bad that it isn't workable. So, I have to put USE="-gtk" in my package.use for LibreOffice. Of course, that has the nasty side-effect of making it look straight out of the GNOME 1 desktop environment.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

Why not try with USE=qt5 to have another data point?

I am not aware of a (presumably) big junk of LibreOffice users having Nvidia GPUs with such issues.

[NathanZachary]

Thanks for your response even on this really old, necrobumped thread.

I assume you mean USE=kde, and I could try that even though it pulls in a lot of dependencies that I don't particularly want. I just wish I knew why GTK3 within LibreOffice caused this problem. I just realised that Audacious now builds with qt5 instead of gtk, so I can't use that as a comparison either.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[NathanZachary]

Also, looking at how few packages have the "gtk" USE flag these days, maybe I should start focusing on qt5 instead:

[NathanZachary]

Well, the lag isn't there when I compile LibreOffice with USE="kde", but then again, I don't see any difference in how it looks either. Unless I'm mistaken, it visually looks exactly the same as when I compile it with neither "kde" nor "gtk" set. In which case, I'd rather not have the dependencies.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[asturm]

If it doesn't look different, then LibreOffice still decides to start with the barebones VCL (but you can switch that per some env var) because it does not recognise your desktop environment as anything to make a better decision itself.

[NathanZachary]

Thanks for the suggestion. Since I only use a WM (Openbox) and not a full DE, that's probably the underlying cause. For me, I'll just deal with it looking the way it does without the GTK or QT interface. I value function over form, so if it works, that's more important to me than it being pretty.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
---avatar cropped from =AimanStudio---