Issue 26785

When working with documents containing large tables (not necessarily large in
text content) Writer becomes excrutiatingly slow when compared to MS Word
(Office 97).  The following scenarios were compared to illustrate this point:
Writer in Linux (Lin), Writer in WindowsME (Win), MS Word in WindowsME (Word)
and finally, Calc in Linux, to provide a comparison with another OOo application
working with tables..  The results are given in respect of these terms (Lin,
Win, Word and Calc).  Here, 'Blink' = the blink of an eye - half a second or less.

To demonstrate: copy the  English Thesaurus index file (thes_en_US.idx) and
re-name it as 'thes_en_US.txt'.  This file has 30, 253 rows of text, but is not
particularly large, being only 505KB.  In both Linux and Windows, close down all
unnecessary applications to give Writer the maximum advantage of the available
system resources.

Start Writer to a blank text document.  Open the test document 'thes_en_US.txt'
with File->Open.
Lin: Blink
Win: Blink
Word: Blink
Calc: Blink
(In Calc, use File->Open and select the file type 'Text CSV'.  Then in the Text
Import dialog, select 'Comma' as the separator, select both columns in the
'Fields' section, then click OK.  Since Calc both opens the text file and
converts it to a table in this one operation, I have attributed the times to be
'Blink' and '2 secs' respectively).

Highlight all the text with Ctrl/Shift/End (Calc: Ctrl/Shift/Right Arrow +
Ctrl/Shift/Down Arrow).
Lin: Blink
Win: Blink
Word: Blink
Calc: Blink

Convert text to table - Lin: Tools->Text<->Table; Win: Table->Convert Text to Table.
Lin: 10 mins 30 secs
Win: 8 mins 30 secs
Word: 30 secs
Calc: 2 secs (done during opening file)

Save file -  File->Save As, give name 'thes_en_US_table', use '.sxw', '.doc' or
'.sxc', as applicable.
Lin: 1 min 46 secs
Win: 51 secs
Word: 4 secs
Calc: 7 secs

Select the table - click before the first character in the first cell of the
table, then scroll down and shift-click after the last character of the last
cell in the table. For this test, wait for the mouse pointer to return, and the
cursor blinking to resume at the end of the selection (otherwise, table
selection hasn't finished).
Lin: 3 mins 35 secs
Win: 1 min 34 secs
Word: Blink
Calc: Blink

Copy the selection to clipboard - click toolbar icon.
Lin: 3 mins 50 secs
Win: 4 mins 18 secs
Word: 3 secs
Calc: Blink

These results show that Writer is much slower than Word in dealing with tables,
regardless of whether Linux or WindowsME is the OS.  Notice that Writer has
acceptable speed when working with the file's contents as plain text.  It only
becomes slow when it is dealing with text as a table.  The issue is that Writer
is *unworkably* slow in this mode; Word shows that it need not be so.  Given the
impediment to general use when using large tables in Writer, a fix for this
issue would be a great enhancement to useability.  Technically, this is an
Enhancement request, as the functions shown here currently work; it's just that
Writer is excruciatingly slow when doing them.  However, I am open to others
changing this issue to a Defect on the basis of it being a defect in usability.
 It's interesting that Calc does much better in useability than Writer.

Notes:

1.  In Linux, the only extra application I had running was 'top', which showed
that 'soffice' was occupying 98 per cent (and higher) of CPU effort during the
'slow' times, and that almost all RAM was being used (free RAM varied between
2.5KB and 5KB).  At no time was the swap file being used.

2.  For references purposes, my machine has an ASUS A7S333 motherboard, AMD
Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM and an ASUS V7100 Pro MX-400 AGP card. 
OS is Mandrake Linux 9.1/ KDE 3.1.0, dual booted with WindowsME (ie, not
state-of-the-art, but no slouch either).