[poppler] Any chance for optimization?

[Norbert Roos]

Hello,

I would like you to ask whether you think that the poppler code has big 
potential to be optimized for speed... please don't hit me if there has 
already done big efforts towards this.

The background for this question is: We are experimenting here with a 
PDF reader on a beagle board clone (an embedded device), which is quite 
slow compared to a usual PC. Each time the zoom level changes, the page 
is rendered from scratch with the specific dpi; i guess there is no way 
around this. Unfortunately, with my test PDF, this takes so long that 
the user won't just realize a kind of delay, but he is really waiting 
and waiting for the result.

The same PDF on an iPod zooms absolutely smoothly, without any 
noticeable render delays, a second device, an Android phone, is a bit 
slower than the iPod, but much faster than my PDF reader using poppler. 
Obviously, somehow some people manage to render faster (or trickier).

Well, and so the question came up: Do you think it could be worth diving 
into the source code and optimize, or would that be hopeless?

Btw, i'm using Qt4 and Splash as backend.

Thanks in advance for your advice

bye
Norbert