Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

urist · 2010-10-21 17:56:14

I've recently been running into a unique problem I've never had before. I read lots of pdfs. On my full-size laptop, every pdf loads extremely slowly. Every reader I use (Evince, xpdf, zathura, apvlv, and Acrobat Reader) maxes my processor for a bit on loading the file. I then have to wait anywhere between five and twenty seconds when scrolling for the next page to load.

This shouldn't be a hardware problem - the files work just fine on my netbook which has similar hardware (equal CPU speed, same amount of RAM). It also shouldn't be an issue with installed packages - both run Arch with a similar software loadout and are kept relatively updated.

I suppose I can just use my netbook, but it's much easier to read on my larger screen.

lagagnon · 2010-10-22 02:03:48

Try launching xpdf from a terminal to read the pdf that gives you the worst response. Do you get any error messages in the terminal ? - if yes post them here. Watch "top" in another terminal. Is the PDF app maxing out your CPU? Do you in fact have the correct video driver loaded for whatever video GPU you are using? (show us the output of lspci and lsmod).

Also, can you upload a particular PDF that you are having problems with so we can look at it? Thanks...

urist · 2010-10-22 03:24:39

lagagnon wrote:

Try launching xpdf from a terminal to read the pdf that gives you the worst response. Do you get any error messages in the terminal ? - if yes post them here. Watch "top" in another terminal. Is the PDF app maxing out your CPU? Do you in fact have the correct video driver loaded for whatever video GPU you are using? (show us the output of lspci and lsmod).
Also, can you upload a particular PDF that you are having problems with so we can look at it? Thanks...

I generally launch from a terminal anyway - easier to quickly switch pdfs that way. No errors.

Checking htop while a file is open shows no abnormal CPU usage until I try to scroll to a page that hasn't yet been loaded. That instantly increases CPU usage from ~2% to 100% for 5-20 seconds. The particular pdf app doesn't matter - I receive the same results when monitoring all of them.

Video drivers aren't a problem - there's only one modern Intel driver and I'm using it. I'm currently on a dialup connection and my laptop doesn't have a modem, or I would paste the whole output. As I'm typing this in by hand, I'll just type the relevant parts.

lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)

lsmod shows the i915 module.

I can't upload a pdf at the moment - they're all tens of megabyte and that would take a good hour at the least on this connection.

My hard drive died last Christmas so I bought a substantially larger one. I don't recall any problems before that. I don't see why that would affect performance, but that's been the only real change between then and now.

olvar · 2010-10-23 23:22:29

Since you mention your hard drive, could you try reading the pdf from a usb key, or better yet, copy it to /dev/shm and read it from there?
I would say that if it stills truggles to render the pdf, then the problem is somewhere in the software that reads it, otherwise could be a problem in your hard drive. Although you would have noticed some other problems

Other important point is that some old pdfs are really difficult to read (I guess it's because they are just a very large picture). My system also has problems reading those sometimes. Could that be the problem?

defears · 2010-10-24 01:23:32

Shot in the dark. If you use nvidia, there is a problem now with antialiased fonts and Xorg 1.9. Had to use nvidia-beta from aur for now.

urist · 2010-10-24 03:59:27

olvar wrote:

Since you mention your hard drive, could you try reading the pdf from a usb key, or better yet, copy it to /dev/shm and read it from there?
I would say that if it stills truggles to render the pdf, then the problem is somewhere in the software that reads it, otherwise could be a problem in your hard drive. Although you would have noticed some other problems
Other important point is that some old pdfs are really difficult to read (I guess it's because they are just a very large picture). My system also has problems reading those sometimes. Could that be the problem?

I've ruled out the hard drive, so I'm in the dark now. Copying to /dev/shm made no difference.

Pictures or no, this laptop has troubles with all but the most simple pdfs that I create through LaTeX for reports and such. The majority of my pdfs are a mix of pictures and text. For instance, I was working on a Shadowrun character yesterday and it's almost painful to use the official pdfs. These aren't low-quality scans. They're pdfs directly from Catalyst that contain both text and images.

I would have figured viewing my Beamer presentations would be horrible, but they also run quite smoothly.

RE: defears;
I'm using Intel in both.

kpbotbot · 2010-10-24 08:36:18

Do the two laptops render the fonts in the same way?

urist · 2010-10-24 14:14:03

Yeah. They've both got the same fonts installed.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-21 17:56:14

Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#2 2010-10-22 02:03:48

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#3 2010-10-22 03:24:39

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#4 2010-10-23 23:22:29

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#5 2010-10-24 01:23:32

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#6 2010-10-24 03:59:27

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#7 2010-10-24 08:36:18

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

#8 2010-10-24 14:14:03

Re: Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

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