Having OpenOffice running in the background wastes memory. It is only needed when check_coversheets runs, so surely it could start OpenOffice at the start of its run.
I think the way the uno_converter works is that if it is called an OpenOffice (soffice.bin) is not running it will start up an instance it can connect to. This feels less efficient as it is for every coversheeting task rather than a check_coversheets run that may coversheet hundreds of PDFs.