[poppler] pdf rendering performance on the olpc test boards

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi,

we have been testing the olpc pdf reader on an test board (based on
evince and poppler) and have found the performance a little below our
expectations. Simple text pages (for example [1]) take about 4 seconds
to render.

After some profiling of page rendering on the board with sysprof, this
functions appeared using 45% of CPU time:

_XcmsLookupColorName
_XcmsSetGetColors
_XcmsInitScrnInfo
_XcmsResolveColorString

We are currently using the 0.5.4 version with the cairo backend. The
processor on the board is a Geode GX-500 [2], the floating point
performance of which is quite poor. Composition is currently done by
software.

Does this info make some sense to anybody? Is poppler who is eating our
CPU or should we look elsewhere? Can you recommend any compilation
options that could improve performance?

I can send the sysprof file, if anyone is interested in giving a look.

Thank you very much,

Tomeu

[1] https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/jones-reprint.pdf
[2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification