Computer Hardware

[bledford]

Hello All,

Over the last several years our use of PDFs have increased dramatically. Not only in quantity but in size (example to large to attach). We are having performance issues with opening large PDF documents. I am certain that this issue is hardware related as we have tested opening the documents with different viewers. Assuming this trend will continue, can you provide some guidance on what types of hardware will enhance the performance of your software (RAM, Processor, Video Card, etc.)? Your input would be greatly appreciated.

Bob

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hello bledford,

Thanks for the post. What is the nature of the performance issues you are having?

One way to increase the memory that the Viewer is allowed to use is described in the following KB:
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowledgebase/230

You could also try using the Editor as it is far better at managing resources and is generally quicker and more advanced.

HTH!

[bledford]

The documents that we are using are large CAD drawings converted to PDF. The documents can take a long time to render. Once a document loads, working on the current page is fine. Changing pages starts the process all over again.

Most of our workstations are dual core with 4gigs of ram. We were thinking to upgrade the workstations to better handle these documents. I’m having had a hard time understanding what type of hardware would best suit our needs. It appears that the memory is consumed very quickly but then settles down to a reasonable number. The processor usually pegs to 100% when working with the documents. We do not know if a good video card would help.

So if you have any experience with this your guidance would be appreciated.

As for using the new Editor, We cannot upgrade at this time because it does not support all the markup tools and pallets that the view has.

Bob

[pice]

Hi bledford,

we are using Intel Core i5 and i7 workstations ( mostly Win7 Prof 64 ) for our users. Some of our PDF files are 150 - 350 MB in size. We had several months with poor performance and a lot of our users complained about long loading/rendering times, but we accomplished good performance gains doing the following:

-Upgrading the machines from 4GB RAM to 16GB RAM
-Replacing the "old" 1TB Harddrives with a 120GB SATA3 SSD
-Turning of the Windows Pagefile completely OFF, there´s no swapping needed with 16 gigs of RAM

We did some testing and for example one ouf our files we tested gave the following results:
( core i7 - old standard harddrive - swapping on - 4gb ram - 343mb filesize ) 41 seconds
( core i7 - old standard harddrive - swapping on - 16gb ram - 343mb filesize ) 32 seconds
( core i7 - old standard harddrive - swapping off - 16gb ram - 343mb filesize ) 26 seconds
( core i7 - new sata3 SSD - swapping off - 16gb ram - 343mb filesize ) 4 seconds

Another thing we did was configuring our Antivirus Software. The scheduled daily scans go over all files&filetypes - the realtime scanner is configured to ignore PDF files - for shorter loading times. We did the same to MS-Office and LibreOffice filetypes to gain performance.

The last thing we did was updating all GPU / GraphisCard drivers to recent versions because in different versions we noticed, that working in PDF documents, even with Adobe Acrobat itself was terribly slow and "laggy". After updating the Nvidia, AMD and Intel drivers everything went fine.

I hope the infos can help... Regards pice

[Lzcat - Tracker Supp]

To improve rendering time you will need:
1. As fast CPU as possible. Viewer/Editor can render PDF in multiple threads, and also use many other background threads, so 2 cores is no enough. However in most cases we not need more that two cores to render page, so cpu with 2 cores and Hyper-threading will be enough. If you working with multipage documents and need to see many pages same time (low zoom or thumbnails pane is on) 4 cores cpu is preferred. Regarding frequency vs core(thread) numbers - we prefer higher frequency (if cpu can handle 4 or more threads same time). Comparing Intel vs AMD processors - now Intel processors has better performance per core, and since we rarely use more than 2 cores in full speed AMD cpus are slower. I would recommend to take alook at modern Intel i5 cpu (2xxx series and above), however i3 also may be suitable. Regarding to server series CPU recommnedations are same - 4 cores (or at least 2 cores with 4 threads) and higer frequency are preferred.
2. 64-bit OS with 64-bit version of Viewer/Editor. In most cases 64-bit code runs faster than 32-bit (but not so much). Other benefit - 64-bit applications can use more than 2 GB of address space (actual memory usage will be less), so you will be able to process large documents without delays to free some memory.
3. At least 8 GB of RAM in dual-channel mode. Actually to render PDF page we rarely need more than 1 GB of RAM, but we have some documents (CAD drawings) which require about 1 GB only for internal PDF data. So it is recommended to have 2-4 GB of unused RAM for Viewer/Editor (more is not needed, unless you need to work with many large documents same time). About memory frequency - there is no reason to by something slower than DDR3-1333, and for most cases faster memory can improve performance no more than 1-5%.
4. We do not use GPU acceleration during rendering (at least for now), so even integrated video will be fast enough. External video card is a bit better because it does not use RAM and share its bandwith with CPU, but in most cases difference will be not noticeable.
5. Viewer (and Editor too) use temporary files to cache fonts/large images and store modified objects, so very slow HDD may slowdown performance. However in most cases windows cache such files in memory (especially if it have some free RAM), so it does matter only when almost all RAM is used and cannot be released.
HTH.

[bledford]

Thank you all for your input. Great Comments!

Bob

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]