Understanding memory leaks in OOo and avoiding their impact
- Mon 26th February 2007, 10:17 pm
I've answered a couple of recent topics which related to a general slowdown of systems running OOo, and a common thread here is the impact of memory leaks. So I thought that it might help to give a brief over overview of what a memory leak is; why they occur in OOo; and what you can do to mitigate the effect. More ... >>>
Terry`s Adventure in Build OOo ? Part III
- Thu 22nd February 2007, 5:08 pm
A Little Hick-up Getting Into gdb
I had a little fun in actually getting debugging to work under a VMware appliance. As soon as I did a gdb <path>/soffice.bin that would be the end of that the VM would slowly die, the host OS would die and finally the client OS would panic. The root cause of this is that gdb needs a lot of memory to load the soffice.bin symbol tables. I ended up needing to allocate 640 Kbytes to the VM to run stably. I could then start to trace the soffice.bin and my first task was to hunt down a nasty memory leak (which is the subject of a separate post). Both running the VM and needing to watch soffice.bin memory usage got me into task manager and interpreting its columns. More ... >>>
Terry`s Adventure in Build OOo ? Part II
- Tue 2nd January 2007, 10:36 pm
Getting to the Point of Hacking
It's four months since I last posted on this one: Terry`s Adventure in Build OOo ? Part I . OK a big part of the delay has been heavy work commitments, but what an uphill learning experience this has been. I spent a couple of months trying to get to the point where I could build OOo. My starting points were the OpenOffice tools page Building OpenOffice.org 2.x (680er series) under Linux and the Wiki article Building OpenOffice.org and related articles. From these I could see that there are two approaches: an "official" build process as referenced on the OpenOffice site and the alternate "ooo-build" process as well. As I said in the first part of this article, I built my system using an openSUSE release. My first thoughts were to try to follow the official process working as near as possible "out of the tin", using the solver tree. More ... >>>
Building a VMware Appliance Playpen
- Fri 29th December 2006, 1:39 pm
I decided to use Ubuntu 6.06 as a playpen for building OOo. However one of the things about a playpen is that you want to make sure that any changes that you make do not contaminate your main working system. Until recently this really meant having a dedicated test box, but thanks to the introduction of free virtualisation products from VMware and Microsoft, the need to have a separate test box is now history — as long as you have enough memory and disk on your host system.
There are some differences between the VMware and Microsoft products, the main two being More ... >>>
