Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 24519
Graphics disappears - suspected due to low memory
Last modified: 2010-06-08 03:34:10 UTC
I was writing a presentation with Impress. One of the pages contained some graphics (image files). They were displayed and saved okay, until at some point I discovered they disappeared (along with another image on another page; i.e., all images were gone). Instead, I could see their frame (in edit more) with a mark of graphics at the corner, but not the image. In play mode, nothing was shown. I suspect this was a result of very low disk space I had. The lowest was about 18M to the best of my knowledge, but it might be the case that I downloaded stuff which filled /tmp, so it might have even reduced to 0 space. In any case, I received not a single warning or any other indication that the save failed. This highly reduces my trust in the software, because I can't know if suddenly my images didn't get lost, and by now I have a lot of them in the presentation. If I received any warning, I could free some space while the images were still in memory, I believe.
If you have very little storage available or, worse, none, you have far greater problems than just a problem with OOo. No programs will modify or store any changes until the condition is fixed. That's the way computers work. This has been discussed in an earlier issue just about a week ago. It's a nightmare for programmers because the point at which to check is not easily definable, multi-user installations make it pointless (someone may eat up available space between OOo checking and OOo saving) and constant checking would result in enormous loss of performance. I believe that summarizes the responses I saw. I DO remember in an MS discussion group that failure to save changes in Word that were attributed to insufficient space led to an MS technician suggesting that a lot of files should be deleted and some documents archived to an off-line disk so that Word would save changes. It's far from unique to OOo.
I think I'm misunderstood. The solutions you describe are by far more drastic than I thought. I do NOT expect OOo to check for free disk space any time it intends to write anything to the disk. I DO expect, however, that when something is written to the disk, the relevant return values and error flags be checked. For example, in C, fwrite() and fprintf() return the number of elements successfully written to the disk. If these were checked, a popup window would tell me ``Write failed.'' or ``Save failed'' or ``Export failed'' or whatever. This would allow a user to track the problem. The kernel certainly knows if writing was successful, and so are higher level functions. I do suspect, however, that these values were not checked. Checking these values is not (significant) time consuming. BTW, today I had a similar problem in Windows (sorry, but I had to use that so-called operating system; I usually 100% linux, but today I had no choice!), so it raised a popup saying write failed. It was due to a quote problem (this was not mentioned in the message; the disk is on Unix...), but if I didn't know that, I might loose some information.
Reassigned to Christian.
please have a look.
Will have a look
I am having the exact same issue as described by the original poster. Once my Impress presentation grew to a certain size the GIF and JPG images I was using in the presentation disappeared exactly as the poster described. Note that these are imported graphic images, not drawings done within Impress. Here's some information about my presentation: Total number of slides: 62 Number of slides with an image: 12 Total number of imported images: 12 Size of slide presentation: 78538 bytes I have retained copies of the images that I'm importing. I can start importing the images again, but by the time I finish they have all disappeared again. I have both a Windows XP desktop and a Linux desktop (SuSE 9.0). I am seeing this behavior on both systems. My Linux box has 512 MB RAM and disk space is NOT AN ISSUE, the filesystem I'm working under on that machine is only 31% utilized. System memory doesn't seem to be an issue either - it might be, but I'm not noticing any system slowdown or anything like that. On my Windows machine, I have 1 GB RAM and again, disk space is not an issue. I am not certain at what point the images started disappearing since I was working on other parts of the presentation at that time. However, I hadn't added many more slides before I noticed the behavior, so maybe around 70K or so would be a good place to start looking. I'll see if I can supply a presentation that can duplicate the problem. The one I'm working on is company confidential.
Hi Matt, yes, a test case would indeed be extremely helpful. And while you're at it, could you please check your free disk space on /tmp and /var/tmp, under Linux (optimally, when you just encountered the graphic lossage)? The amount of free space available at the place where the actual document is stored isn't remotely as critical as the free tmp space, for this problem.
I went back through my presentation and added the images back into the presentation. I took out one slide that had an image in it. This left me with eleven images on eleven slides. I DID NOT SAVE the presentation. After adding all the images back in, I went back through the presentation and noticed that all the images were still displaying in the presentation. At this point I saved my work, and after having saved, the images disappeared. Immediately after this I checked disk space via du and df. Results of "du -H /var/tmp": O /var/tmp Results of "df -H /var/tmp": Size: 13G, Used: 891M, Available: 12G, 7% utilized Results of "du -H /tmp": 7.4M /tmp Results of "df -H /tmp": Size: 13G, Used: 4.0G, Available: 9.0G, 31% utilized (/tmp is on the same filesystem as where the presentation is being stored)
Ah. Now, that sounds like my favorite issue 22235, which should be fixed in 1.1.1. Would you do me a favor and try your scenario once again, with the OOo1.1.1RC?
Hmm, bad news. (Well, good news for me, but bad for the issue.) I reopened my presentation and now everything is working fine. I can't reproduce this bug with my slideshow any more. However, I did look at issue 22235 and I agree that they appear to be the same problem. For now, I am going to stay with OOo1.1.0 and see if I can get the issue to manifest again. When that happens, I will upgrade to 1.1.1rc and see if it fixes the problem, and notify here if that occurs. In the meantime I will be monitoring this issue to see if I can be of any other help.
I was able to duplicate the problem using OOo 1.1.0 as I expected I would be able to do. I then installed OOo 1.1.1rc as suggested and that did appear to clear up the problem.
Okay, since this problem seems to be fixed in OOo1.1.1, I close this issue.
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I am having this issue now with Impress (OpenOffice.org v3.2.0) on a pc running windows 7 with 453 gig of free space on my hard drive. I saved an impress document and when I open it now, i see the location of the image files I added to the document. But I can't get them to actually show on the slideshow nor will they print. Any hints to what i may have done wrong?