837817 - http://www.svenskabio.se/fileadmin/Bio/nyhetsblad/BO.pdf renders surprisingly slowly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Torbjörn Andersson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0.12) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.12 Iceweasel/10.0.12
Build ID: 20130108232239

Steps to reproduce:

I loaded the following PDF into Firefox Nightly, running on Linux (Debian): http://www.svenskabio.se/fileadmin/Bio/nyhetsblad/BO.pdf


Actual results:

It took a surprisingly long time to render it at 100% zoom. To eliminate network delays, I downloaded the file and pointed Firefox to my copy of it. It took about a minute from the time a white rectangle appeared for the page contents to even start appearing, and another ten seconds or so for it to finish rendering. Admittedly, my computer is a few years old now.


Expected results:

It's all subjective, of course, but it would have been nice if it had been a bit quicker about it. By comparison, "evince" took less than 5 seconds to do the same thing (plus another few seconds to generate a thumbnail). I noticed that the document contains some fairly high-resolution images, so maybe they're what's slowing things down?

Since the PDF changes every week (it shows what movies are playing at my local cinema), I've archived a copy of this particular PDF at http://www.update.uu.se/~d91tan/BO.pdf but I imagine that the one at the original URL will keep behaving more or less the same, even when it's replaced.

Comment 1

[[:Aleksej]]

Confirmed with 19.0b≈4 and 2013-02-05-03-10-33-mozilla-central-firefox-21.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64

Comment 2

[Torbjörn Andersson]

I just read on Nicholas Nethercote's blog that pdf.js had seen some recent optimizations, so I decided to test again with the current Nightly build [1]. The PDF document that used to take over a minute to render on my computer now only takes about 15 seconds. Still not as fast as a standalone PDF viewer, but fast enough that I wouldn't consider it a bug any longer.

Good job!

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/1e9f169c9715

Comment 3

[Torbjörn Andersson]

I tried again, loading the PDF from my hard disk insead of from www.update.uu.se, and I'd estimate it took about 12 seconds. I also tested it with the current Debian "Iceweasel" (24.3) and it took about 25 which, while a bit sluggish, is also a very clear improvement over what I reported a year ago.

Comment 4

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

I just tried this. With evince, the document takes 2--3 seconds to load. With a development version of pdf.js it takes 4--5 seconds. Normally the relative speed of pdf.js vs. evince is worse than this. I don't think there's much more to be done here.