Java makes OpenOffice crash

[Ramtaturis]

Since when I upgraded OpenSuse from 10.2 to 11.3 (big jump, I know!), I can no longer use OpenOffice.
When Java is Active, the OO applications crash after a few operations. Most of times they don't even start.

When run in a terminal, OO answers with errors like this:

Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 24 bytes for CHeapObj-new. Out of swap space?
#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
# SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007f9065574190, pid=10750, tid=140258732500768
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (1.5.0_17-b04 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# C 0x00007f9065574190
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as hs_err_pid10750.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
#
[error occurred during error reporting, step 270, id 0xb]

The content of file hs_err_pid10750.log can be seen here
# # An unexpected error has b - Hs_err_pid10750.log - U62KKRiq - Pastebin.com

I tried to:

• Use openjdk runtime environment
• Upgrade JRE to the latest Sun version and select it in OpenOffice
• Downgrade JRE to the version (1.5.0) that worked in OpenSuse 10.2, and select it in OO
• Remove openjdk packages (After having read somewhere that they may be unstable)
• Delete ~/.ooo3 directory
• Force the installation of JRE from OpenSuse Java repository

...but nothing worked. Only if I disable Java in OpenOffice, I can use the applications, but the functionalities are (obviously) limited and an annoying nag window invites me to reactivate Java every time it's needed (up to 5 times in a row).

I'm actually using
OpenSuse 11.3, 64 bit
OpenOffice 3.2.1.4-1.1
Java sun 1.6.0.u20-1.2

Can anybody help me?

[gogalthorp]

10.2 to 11.3 is a huge jump. I'd say it is best to do a new clean install. No telling what cruft was left behind from 10.2

[Ramtaturis]

Thank you for the answer.

When I decided for an upgrade instead of a clean install, I desired to avoid reinstalling all the server applications, in particular the LAMP system. During the upgrade everything seemed to be ok and not even a single package conflict error was encountered. After the upgrade I had to compile and manually install the Openchrome driver (not included in Suse DVD) and to do a bit of fine tuning in smb.conf to allow the network scanner to keep working, but all the rest worked apparently flawlessly, except for... OpenOffice.

Since that computer is mainly used for office applications and only secondarily as a LAMP server, I think that I'll finally take the decision to do a clean install anyway. I only have to find the correct procedure for a quick and safe backup & restore of the LAMP applications. I never did it before and I am a bit nervous about it, but I definitely need to discover how to use my backups in case of a disaster.

[Will Honea]

Ramtaturis wrote:

>
> Thank you for the answer.
>
> When I decided for an upgrade instead of a clean install, I desired to
> avoid reinstalling all the server applications, in particular the LAMP
> system. During the upgrade everything seemed to be ok and not even a
> single package conflict error was encountered. After the upgrade I had
> to compile and manually install the Openchrome driver (not included in
> Suse DVD) and to do a bit of fine tuning in smb.conf to allow the
> network scanner to keep working, but all the rest worked apparently
> flawlessly, except for... OpenOffice.
>
> Since that computer is mainly used for office applications and only
> secondarily as a LAMP server, I think that I'll finally take the
> decision to do a clean install anyway. I only have to find the correct
> procedure for a quick and safe backup & restore of the LAMP
> applications. I never did it before and I am a bit nervous about it, but
> I definitely need to discover how to use my backups in case of a
> disaster.

When 11.2 first came out, I had similar problems with a few apps including
oo. Since the major programs all came through in decent shape, I elected to
try simply deleting and re-installing only the problem apps. The one that
made the biggest difference was Java. I dropped all installations of any
form of Java or openJDK. I also scanned /usr, /opt, and /var and wiped any
Java references. After re-installing Java (I use the Sun/Oracle version)
from scratch, only oo was still having some problems so I uninstalled that
and wiped the .ooo* (you may have something left from ooo2) from the home
folder and re-installed. I have since decided that Java was NOT the problem
(other than mixing openJDK and the real thing - bad idea!) and could
probably have gotten by with simply re-installing oo to a clean environment.

Like you, I had several servers I didn't want to re-configure and DB2
databases that take hours to restore so I figured that if this method didn't
work I didn't lose much time. Everything worked fine in oo except Base and
I have problems with that even on complete wipe/fresh installs.

--
Will Honea

[ab]

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Hash: SHA1

It would be prudent to try a new user to see if it is a user-specific
problem. This can be done easily creating a new user (then logging in
with it and seeing if it works better) or by renaming the old
user-specific preferences directory in your current user's home directory
(usually something like .ooo2 or .ooo3). Creating a new user is a safer,
and typically faster, way to do this test, though.

Good luck.





On 08/01/2010 04:08 PM, Will Honea wrote:
> Ramtaturis wrote:
>
>>
>> Thank you for the answer.
>>
>> When I decided for an upgrade instead of a clean install, I desired to
>> avoid reinstalling all the server applications, in particular the LAMP
>> system. During the upgrade everything seemed to be ok and not even a
>> single package conflict error was encountered. After the upgrade I had
>> to compile and manually install the Openchrome driver (not included in
>> Suse DVD) and to do a bit of fine tuning in smb.conf to allow the
>> network scanner to keep working, but all the rest worked apparently
>> flawlessly, except for... OpenOffice.
>>
>> Since that computer is mainly used for office applications and only
>> secondarily as a LAMP server, I think that I'll finally take the
>> decision to do a clean install anyway. I only have to find the correct
>> procedure for a quick and safe backup & restore of the LAMP
>> applications. I never did it before and I am a bit nervous about it, but
>> I definitely need to discover how to use my backups in case of a
>> disaster.
>
> When 11.2 first came out, I had similar problems with a few apps including
> oo. Since the major programs all came through in decent shape, I elected to
> try simply deleting and re-installing only the problem apps. The one that
> made the biggest difference was Java. I dropped all installations of any
> form of Java or openJDK. I also scanned /usr, /opt, and /var and wiped any
> Java references. After re-installing Java (I use the Sun/Oracle version)
> from scratch, only oo was still having some problems so I uninstalled that
> and wiped the .ooo* (you may have something left from ooo2) from the home
> folder and re-installed. I have since decided that Java was NOT the problem
> (other than mixing openJDK and the real thing - bad idea!) and could
> probably have gotten by with simply re-installing oo to a clean environment.
>
> Like you, I had several servers I didn't want to re-configure and DB2
> databases that take hours to restore so I figured that if this method didn't
> work I didn't lose much time. Everything worked fine in oo except Base and
> I have problems with that even on complete wipe/fresh installs.
>
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[Carlos E. R.]

On 2010-08-01 18:36, gogalthorp wrote:
>
> 10.2 to 11.3 is a huge jump. I'd say it is best to do a new clean
> install. No telling what cruft was left behind from 10.2

That's premature. The root cause should be found.

My other system has been updated from 7.3 to 11.2, no reason to solve problems by reinstallation at
the first hint of a problem >:-)

--
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" GM (Elessar))

[Carlos E. R.]

On 2010-08-01 22:36, Ramtaturis wrote:
>
> Thank you for the answer.
>
> When I decided for an upgrade instead of a clean install, I desired to
> avoid reinstalling all the server applications, in particular the LAMP
> system. During the upgrade everything seemed to be ok and not even a
> single package conflict error was encountered. After the upgrade I had
> to compile and manually install the Openchrome driver (not included in
> Suse DVD) and to do a bit of fine tuning in smb.conf to allow the
> network scanner to keep working, but all the rest worked apparently
> flawlessly, except for... OpenOffice.
>
> Since that computer is mainly used for office applications and only
> secondarily as a LAMP server, I think that I'll finally take the
> decision to do a clean install anyway. I only have to find the correct
> procedure for a quick and safe backup & restore of the LAMP
> applications. I never did it before and I am a bit nervous about it, but
> I definitely need to discover how to use my backups in case of a
> disaster.

I would instead install a fresh 11.3 in another partition, and test there that OO works. If it
works, then compare both and find out why your main system doesn't work.


Or, you can try installing a different java.

The error complains about outofmemory. Do you have enough? how is your swap?


Mmm, I see in your log:


Memory: 4k page, physical 744692k(8108k free), swap 498008k(466932k free)

Let me see, that is about 744M (8M free), swap 498M(466M free)

Is it right, you have less than a gigabyte and only half for swap? That's too little for java.

--
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" GM (Elessar))

[Ramtaturis]

Solved!

Thanks to Carlos's suggestion, I decided to concentrate my attention on the RAM
At first I enlarged the swap. As explained in this guide, I added a supplementary swap file with the following commands:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap_1 bs=1024 count=1000000
# mkswap /swap_1
# swapon /swap_1

so that I had this situation

~ free -tom
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached                                                                                             
Mem:           727        712         14          0         18        168                                                                                             
Swap:         1462         27       1435                                                                                                                              
Total:        2190        740       1449

# swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda2                               partition       498008  26960   -1
/swap_1                                 file            999996  0       -2

...but OpenOffice kept on crashing

Anyway, I decided to keep the larger swap file, so I added to /etc/fstab the following line

/swap_1     swap                 swap       defaults              0 0

and I turned my PC off.

Next, I decided to add more physical RAM, so I replaced the 256 MiB module with a 512 MiB one.

I turned the PC on and it finally worked!!

I could suppose that the crash was caused by insufficient physical RAM, but when I replaced back the 256 MiB memory module at the very same place, where it was before, OpenOffice continued working.

The hypothesis is now that the memory module had an imperfect electrical contact, but I still can't understand why it affected only OpenOffice+Java and not other RAM-hungry applications such as Firefox. I can't exclude that after having added the new swap file, I had to reboot the system to properly use the new environment.

I thank you all for your answers.

P.S. I still need to test the validity of the backups of my LAMP server, but I think I'll do it on a sandbox machine, without endangering the real server.

[gogalthorp]

The small memory may have been needed to do the initialization but in any case put all the memory you can into it. 256Meg is just not enough.

[Ramtaturis]

The small memory may have been needed to do the initialization but in any case put all the memory you can into it. 256Meg is just not enough.

It was not an initialization broblem, since OO started sometimes, but it crashed after few operations.

I had (and I have) 768MB of RAM. I talked about 256MB only referring to memory modules, since I have 512+256