[poppler] poppler vs foxit

[JustFillBug]

On 2010-12-18, dE . <de.techno at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Foxit reader appears to be the fastest PDF reader in the industry, it seems
> to be faster by many times than any other application available. The
> scenario is such that at least I have to use Foxit simply cause it's a
> necessity since applications which run on poppler take minutes to render the
> same PDF what foxit does in a few seconds.
>
> So I was wondering if the poppler team is aware of this, although foxit is
> avilable for Linux, but it'll be great if you could revile of secrets of
> foxit.
>

I don't know about foxit, but when I use sysprof on evince, it seems
that poppler spends most of its time on loading JPEG files. Apparently,
decoding JPEG images inside PDF files are very slow, maybe it's just
libjpeg was slow or the way poppler feeding libjpeg.

But that's not the worst performance killer. What's kills the speed on
evince is that evince try to preload 5-10 pages before it displays your
current page. So every time you scroll back or forword a new page, you
have to wait for it to finish the preloading of some other pages. Killed
all the benefit of preloading.

It should only preload pages on idle mode and when CPU load is low. If
it detected the CPU load is up, it should stop the preload thing.

No one cares how slow evince loading pages.