Why is opening a PDF so slow?

Created by Steven Sproat
Keywords:
slow pdf convert

A PDF, or a PostScript file is passed to an external program, ImageMagick to convert the PDF into a Whyteboard-readable filetype (in our case, a PNG).

The time to convert the PDF/PS file cannot be predicted, as it varied on machine to machine and is called through a command line interface which provides no feedback on the progress on the conversion.

After converting, the images are loaded, which is a quick process, but then all the thumbnails must be updated, which does take a little time. The amount of pages (or in Whyteboard's case, tabs) generally dictate the length of time to update the thumbnails, as each tab has a corresponding thumbnail

It took almost 13 seconds to refresh the thumbnails for a save file I loaded which contained 260 tabs. This is with a dual-core athlon 64bit 2.5GHz, 2GB DDR RAM....PC is around 3.5 years old

but, that was a mammoth stress test as it's unlikely to be dealing with this many tabs