Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

Dusty · 2006-03-11 16:26:10

It usually takes several tens of seconds for acroread to open up for me. Once its been opened and then closed and I open it again, it only takes a couple of seconds (ie: in memory). Is there any reason it would take so long the first time, something I can speed up? Its not that huge and ungainly a program that it should take so long on a processor this speed. It also doesn't seem to be an IO problem because my disk monitors don't spike while waiting for the pig to open. The only thing I could think of was perhaps its making a network access before opening (adobe spyware??), but this seems unlikely... and even if it was happening, it shouldn't take that long because I have a hell of a good internet connection too.

I suppose maybe its because its distributed as a binary... not i686 like I'm used to. Could be that.

Ok, but for the ranting -- does anybody have any ideas how I can speed the bloody thing up? Its really annoying when I happen to click a pdf link in firefox and the whole browser freezes for more than half a minute while acroread is checking itself in the mirror...

Dusty

murkus · 2006-03-11 19:11:23

I've noticed the same thing. Bloody annoying. Unfortunately I've no idea how to remedy it..

arooaroo · 2006-03-11 20:19:28

I seem to remember that there was a lot of fuss about acrobat performance for all platforms and it had something to do with plugin loading. I recall someone writing a guide about removing a load of plugins that are unlikely to be used and that improved things a lot.

I'm sorry, but I don't have any specifics. I agree that the freezing in firefox is very annoying. I really ought to investigate myself...

wrj · 2006-03-11 21:27:06

I think it has something to do with a font cache file acrobat tries to read at startup. There was a discussion about this on the gentoo forums a few months ago.

On my system the file is ~/.adobe/Acrobat/7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst.
The suggested workaround was to add the following to the startup binary
/usr/bin/acroread:

rm ~/.adobe/Acrobat/7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst

I'm not sure what the sideffects are, but I haven't noticed any yet.

hotsauce · 2006-03-11 21:54:22

Dusty wrote:

does anybody have any ideas how I can speed the bloody thing up?

sorry to piss on the parade, but why not use xpdf? takes about 1 second to open can search, zoom, change page. I haven't really used any additional functionnalities from acroread but would be curious what they are (especially since it's not even the professional version) to justify that absolutely obscene load time.

MAC!EK · 2006-03-11 22:04:32

Does xpdf has a firefox plugin?

I think after adding that rm line acroread starts faster.
EDIT: hmm, no, it doesn't start faster it was only once.

Dusty · 2006-03-11 22:36:05

hotsauce wrote:

Dusty wrote:
does anybody have any ideas how I can speed the bloody thing up?
sorry to piss on the parade, but why not use xpdf?

I used to flip between it and kpdf, but neither of them supports enough of the many pdfs I have to read. I'm not sure what's special about them, but I'm looking at literally dozens of papers per week, and at least half of them don't seem to render properly in the open source alternatives to acroread. I haven't tried them in a while though, perhaps they work better.

Dusty

hotsauce · 2006-03-11 23:03:24

I see what you mean. Well I must look at about 20-25 pdfs a week and it all shows up fine. Admittedly they're pretty much all from the same kind of sources. Give it a try anyway, you'll loose about 2 minutes if doesn't work

Ciao

rinzai · 2006-03-13 21:15:11

Is it possible that it has something to do with the fact that it's statically linked to the gtk+ libs? Opera, which is statically linked to qt, doesn't start fast either (as opposed to other qt/kde apps).

iggy · 2006-03-13 23:12:58

it is because of the plugins! disable the plugins you do not need by renaming them. you find the plugins in /opt/acrobat/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins/.

codemac · 2006-03-14 03:50:21

Whoa, I moved the plug_ins directory to pplug_ins, and it launches in under a second.

Dusty · 2006-03-14 04:12:00

I left the plugins alone and did what wrj said and the performance increase is great too.

Dusty

Arch Linux

#1 2006-03-11 16:26:10

Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#2 2006-03-11 19:11:23

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#3 2006-03-11 20:19:28

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#4 2006-03-11 21:27:06

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#5 2006-03-11 21:54:22

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#6 2006-03-11 22:04:32

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#7 2006-03-11 22:36:05

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#8 2006-03-11 23:03:24

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#9 2006-03-13 21:15:11

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#10 2006-03-13 23:12:58

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#11 2006-03-14 03:50:21

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

#12 2006-03-14 04:12:00

Re: Any reason acroread is so slow to startup?

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