minutes of ESC call ...

[Jan-Marek Glogowski]

Hi everybody,

Am 10.07.2014 21:50, schrieb Michael Meeks:
> * Mail Merge (Eilidh,Bjoern,Jan-Marek)
>       + Multiple people looking at this (Bjoern)
>           + no wonder it is very slow; if you use the std. way of clicking through the UI
>           + it creates one document, then it merges the 2nd one into that & re-layout
>             with each step.
>           + huge cost for 10k documents - some N^2.
>           + one reason - is to remember the page number to split the document
>               + really quite insane.
>           + naive approach - use bookmarks to split the documents ...
>               + could save the re-layout.
>       + Have some examples - 16k -> 20k documents (Jan Marek)
>           + the copying of the docs gets slower & slower.
>               + https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80823
>           + layouting is 3-4% the rest is just copying.
>           + in the copying of the underlying document.

We attached a simple example document to our bug
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79067

Times are:

 500 |  3:20
 750 |  8:10
1000 | 17:15
1500 | 56:50
1750 | 92:20

Time basically duplicates for each added 250 pages..., but I guess it
gets really worse with kind of O(n^2).

>       + Primary problem cf. mail (Jan Marek)
>           + see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2014-July/062227.html for the gory details
>           + loading of a document is broken: with paragraph-bound anchors.
>           + patches in private/jmux/mailmerge-fixes branch - can create copies.
>               + before that, copying from A->B is broken.
>               + lots of pending patches; want to finish them and write
>                 some unit tests from test docs in mail-merge bugs.
>           + https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80926

This bug is currently our main show-stopper for the next release.
It's not nice, that MM is slow for our complex example, but this bug
means, that quite a lot of new and existing documents can't be opened
correctly. The doc is visually broken in Writer and saving and printing
results in a broken document / print. Unfortunatly we have already
generated a lot of "these" documents with OOo 3.2.1 in the last few years...

I'm working on this bug, but it's very strange. Yesterday I've created
an example with four pages and four lines wich seems to load
correctly... (with yesterdays master build).

Actually there might be two seperate bugs involved with the same "result"...

>       + Bjoern's callgrind results are different (Bjoern)
>           + with an artificial document, perhaps not representative, but
>             showed the problem ~all in layout.
>       + Something has changed wrt. copying the SwNodes (Jan-Marek)
>       + performance is hard to keep good (Michael)
>           + be great to have a test we can add to our performance tests
>       + working on a branch: private/jmux/mailmerge-fixes
>           + should all work on same branch ? (Bjoern)
>           + currently doing re-factoring elsewhere (Ellie)
>               + breaking down the massive / monolithic mail merge fn.
>       + mail-merge is now working correctly (Jan-Marek)
>           + problem with anchors
>       + looking for free-lancers to do some LibreOffice work with Munich (Jan-Marek)
>           + primary bug fixing Writer
>  

Jan-Marek