Inter i5 Mac - Sequoia 15.4 - Libre Office very bad perfomance

K_P
K_P Posts: 56 Contributor
in Device Protection

Hi,

It seems that F-Secure Total v. 25.3 (64654) on Mac is totally ruining performance for Libre Office v. 25.2.2.2.

When I temporarily disable scanning on Total, performance is ok. When scanning is back performance degrades heavily: e.g. selecting text box in Impress takes 3..4 secods, same for simply changing the slide in edit mode.

I can not say is this is related to any recent updates as I have not needed office tools for quite some time.

Any remedies on getting Libre Office performance to work ok with Total?

Change to Open Office is not an option, due to languages I need to hyphen support for.

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Answers

  • pajp
    pajp Posts: 114 F-Secure Employee

    Hi,

    thanks for your message. Can you please enable debug logging (Total settings → Support → Enable debug logging, then go to General → Device Management in the macOS settings to approve the debug logging profile), then reproduce the issue, and create a diagnostics file using Support Tool? You can then send the resulting fsdiag.tar.gz file to me in a private message.

    We till try to reproduce it in house as well but getting diagnostics from you will ensure that we're looking at the same thing.

    Thanks!

    Rasmus Sten

    F-Secure Technology, Mac Team

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  • pajp
    pajp Posts: 114 F-Secure Employee

    Hi,

    just so you know, I've received your fsdiag and your issue is being worked on. However we cannot share an ETA of a fix at this time.

    In the meantime, one thing you can do to improve the performance somewhat is running the following command in Terminal:

    sudo xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LibreOffice.app

    Note: this can potentially take a very long time because it will trigger an antivirus scan of every file in the LibreOffice app bundle.

    Once that command has completed, performance should be slightly better. Let me know if it helps!

    Rasmus Sten

    F-Secure Technology, Mac Team

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  • K_P
    K_P Posts: 56 Contributor

    Hi,

    Thank you for the guidance Before running the command, can you elaborate a bit what it does? Does it just scan the app bundle, or does it change Total's behavior against that app somehow?

    Regards,
    Kimmo

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  • pajp
    pajp Posts: 114 F-Secure Employee

    Hi,

    To explain I'll provide some background information about how macOS security works.

    Files downloaded from the internet (for example) get a special attribute on macOS, called the "quarantine" attribute (formal name "com.apple.quarantine"). The quarantine attribute informs the operating system that it should pay extra attention to the files from a security perspective. F-Secure Total also use this same attribute as a signal that it should pay special attention to those files (for example, scan for malware).

    What this command does is remove the quarantine attribute from the LibreOffice app bundle.

    Doing this will indicate to both macOS and our product that those files should not be treated with this extra attention. The end result is that access to those files will be faster, because our product will spend less time inspecting them (it will not completely ignore those files, it will for example still scan any executables launched from that app bundle).

    When you run the command, our product will detect the removal of this attribute and scan the file for malware, and prevent the removal if malware is found, so running this command will indirectly cause a full scan of the LibreOffice app bundle (which is why it'll take a while to complete).

    As you have already launched LibreOffice it has already been scanned by both macOS Gatekeeper and our software, thus removing its quarantine attribute is a safe operation.

    Rasmus Sten

    F-Secure Technology, Mac Team

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