[poppler] pdftoppm busy-waiting?

[Lucio Crusca]

Hello *,

I have a webapp (php) that creates some pdf files and then it needs to create 
corresponding thumbnail previews.

The app calls a bash script, which in turn calls another script through "sudo 
-E" to avoid file permission problems (yes, terrible hack I know).

That last script, running with root permissions, calls pdftoppm to create the 
thumbnail. The exact command is:

cat ancona.txt.^00.1.pdf | pdftoppm -f 1 -l 1 -r 25 -jpeg - ancona.txt^00.1

Now all this stuff on my notebook (ubuntu desktop 11.04 32 bit) works without 
problems. The exact same code, on a real server (ubuntu 11.04 server x86_64) 
makes pdftoppm hang while eating 100% of the cpu...

I'm not sure the -E option to sudo is actually working, but I'm not sure about 
how to check that either...

Any clues?