[aklug] Re: video system questions

From: Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com>
Date: Tue Feb 21 2012 - 01:50:04 AKST

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On 02/20/2012 04:53 PM, Greg Madden wrote:

>
> Thanks for the suggestions, tryed both, none are an improvement in
> speed over the pdf viewers, though pdf2svg is recommended for
> those who want to edit a pdf file...good to know, and mirage is a
> nice light viewer, add to the pile :-)
>
> I have noticed, in top, that one processor hits 100%, none of the
> other cores are used. by the process. If it is a cpu issue seems
> using more cores would help.
>

I think the fundamental problem is that PDF isn't an image format, it
is a portable document format that stores images. Consequently, the
PDF viewer code base isn't going to be focused on getting the fastest
possible document -> image -> rendering. To really get that speed you
are looking for, the software would presumably need be running
multi-threaded handling of images chunks and utilizing all the
relevant multimedia instructions or acceleration pipelines to handle
resizing and layout. PDF viewers aren't made for this.

If I were in your shoes, I'd focus again on the image conversion idea,
trying to get the PDFs in a format that can be handled by powerful
image viewer. On my system, I'm finding that the latest version
(3.2.2) of the image viewer eog <http://www.gnome.org/projects/eog/>
handles even the most massive JPEGs I have at lightning speed.

As far as rendering PDFs faster, though, you might check to see if you
have the latest version of evince. On my distro, evince is masked
stable at 2.32, but has actually progressed up to 3.2.1. You could
also build from source and pass in some optimizing flags for your
processor, at least -march=native.

Some other long shots: 1) try launching your PDF viewer with a higher
nice setting (see NICE(1)); 2) mount a ramdisk and throw a few PDFs
onto it, and see if they render any faster.

- --
frigidcode.com
indicium.us
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Received on Tue Feb 21 01:49:43 2012

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