pdf.js rendering performance

[hello_wrold]

Hello there User Research,

some feedback from our users: we got complaints about the PDF-renderer so slow that
it hurts. They have to deal with scanned documents and the larger ones take >15s
to render on a somewhat recent machine, which is quite a step back from what they
are used to.

I'm aware that this due to the way/the parameters the PDFs were created with but we
have to live with what we've got. As of now, this might be a mayor annoyance and will
decrease our users' experience with their brand new DMS.

I don't know how much potential speed-up pdf.js has, but if not: is there any plan B
or C like to bring back the old flash based renderer or anything?

Cheers,
  -daniel

[hello_wrold]

Just as a followup: the scans we are using were encoded as JPEG2000 with the Luratech compressor. Decoding JPEG2000 means far more load on the CPU – on a native renderer you won't see much of a difference, however pdf.js is such a resources hog that JPEG2000 is a clear no-go.

[sscbrian]

We use Alfresco as part of our accounting process, where vendors e-mail us invoices.  Some vendor files are very large (2 MiB) and take a very long time to render the PDF, but most of the small ones render instantly.

[sscbrian]

Update: This appears to vary widely between browsers.  We've now moved to Firefox as our standard as PDF.js appears to perform the best there (opening documents in half a second that other browsers can take 20+ seconds to open).