I've had a very good experience with Poppler overall doing something relatively similar to your idea.<div><br></div><div>Caching PDFDoc objects is an OK start, in some cases I've had it take minutes to load a large document (1gb+) and overall they don't take much memory to keep around (e.g. you could keep a fairly large number in a LRU cache).</div> <div><br></div><div>I would really recommend performing a large-size rendering once for each page requested and caching on disk (as a PNG/JPEG) and resizing on the fly to match the dimensions requested, the initial rasterization process is the most CPU intensive process while resizing a PNG/JPEG is a predictable, easy to cache and constant time.</div> <div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 26 January 2011 19:24, Erik Rehn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erik@slagkryssaren.com">erik@slagkryssaren.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hey Popplers!<br> <br> This is my first message to this list, hope there is some activity. :)<br> <br> Anyway, im doing some research into the field of pdf rendering and came across poppler/xpdf which seems to be quite easy to work with. Now I have some questions for you guys :)<br> <br> How fast is Poppler compared to other pdf libraries, commercial and open source? What im looking for is the fastest way possible to render pdfs into bitmaps. Ive done some testing with the pdftoppm tool and it seem to be slightly slower than for instance Foxit's SDK.<br> <br> Is there any optimization that could be done to speed up the rendering? My goal is to develop a server side pdf rendering engine which clients can request individual pages from. If for instance the same page is requested twice but in different sizes is there any part of the rendering process that could be cached to save work?<br> One thing would be to cache PDFDoc objects to avoid parsing the same pdf over and over, does anyone have any thoughts on that?<br> <br> Thanks for your help!<br> <br> Best regards,<br><font color="#888888"> Erik Rehn<br> _______________________________________________<br> poppler mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:poppler@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank">poppler@lists.freedesktop.org</a><br> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/poppler" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/poppler</a><br> </font></blockquote></div><br></div>