Office listing in Applications Menu slows system

This is something I’ve noticed on multiple systems and hardware. Using the Menu Bar, accessing the Applications category listings works fine generally with the exception of the Office section, which halts or hangs for a few seconds while doing something before showing the apps available in that section. No other categories seem to do this for me.

Any idea what is causing this? More importantly any way to fix this behavior? Because word processing is a typical use for a desktop or laptop and the slow down is a paper cut that impacts the perception of the overall system speed.

Is this as common as I think it is or am I the only one experiencing it?

I’m running 16.04 MATE and just checked the menu wrt office. My experience does not mimic yours.
Possibly providing some details about your system would help us help you.

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The Libre Ofice sub-menu in the main menu should only be slow on the first opening as it populates the icons in the menu. From there onwards, it should open okay. I remember Martin Wimpress mentioning this a few months back

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Hi @bornagainpenguin,

opening Office Writer here does it in about 1.5 secs!, have you done a full system update?:

I think it’s because the icons used by LibreOffice are large scaled SVGs, which takes the menu much longer to load then a small 24x24-ish SVG.

You might check to see if your icon set has a icon-theme.cache file if your using a custom icon set that doesn’t have one it will slow things down.

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As I’ve said before I’ve noted this happening on multiple hardware. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be consistent–some times it happens and other times it doesn’t.

Is there a reason why this is so? Might it make sense to use the same size icons across the board on the system to optimize for speed?

Where would I check this? Would it be in the .icons folder of any user installed themes? Should I assume all system icon themes have this by default? (I generally use the system included themes for icons.)

Sorry I took so long to get back to this, got busy. Thanks to the people who replied, even if they’re not seeing this on their systems.

[quote=“bornagainpenguin, post:7, topic:5794”]
As I’ve said before I’ve noted this happening on multiple hardware. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be consistent–some times it happens and other times it doesn’t.
[/quote]I have no doubt that you are experiencing this … please pich one of the multiple hardware platforms and let’s try to examine it. Post the output of this command

inxi -ACDMNSG

Please make the output when posting with the code tag </>

To the contrary, I’ve experienced this in every machine I’ve installed UM 16.04 upon. However as stevecook172001 has said, once the menu has been populated the first time, the odd delay experienced at first, subsequently stops.

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I’ll chek it out by installing UM in VirtualBox
Installed 32 and 64 bit instances in VirtualBox and I cannot verify the subject … icons presented equally fast for all categories in Applications menu - the first action taken after reboot was to test Applications menu
@Glenn + @bornagainpenguin

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This should have been fix in the default Ambiant-MATE themes in 16.04. What Ubuntu MATE version and icon theme are you using?

I confirm Ambiant-MATE icon theme is not affected by this on 16.04, even on my puny N3150-based machines the menu unfolds instantly.

Yeah, I can confirm my previous answer to this question is based on my experiences pre-16.04. I hadn’t bothered to take notice if it was still doing it in 16.04. Nice to hear it has been fixed. Not that is was anything other than a trivial issue anyway.

If you installed a custom icon theme in .icons in the terminal type gtk-update-icon-cache .icons/THEME NAME/ it will create a cache file and make things much more responsive. Of course replace THEME NAME with the appropriate name.

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