Jochen Maes' email has reminded me of something: Some performance findings from my FOP PDF generation jobs (between 5.000 and 50.000 PDFs per job):
Performance killers are: - Images of any kind (but still better than SVG). A very small GIF image (black/white logo) can triple the rendering time of a 2-page document. This may be related to PDF output only - didn't check. - SVG (high setup cost) - use images instead wherever possible - Not enough main memory for a single job (yes, I have some 200 page-jobs that don't even fit within 1GB of main memory...). Rendering performance can drop to less than 1% once swapping begins, The Sun VM 1.3 seems to have a limit for -Xmx of 1GB. JRockit can be used instead. Note that by "performance killer" I mean things that prevent FOP from generating more than 2-3 PDFs per second on a moderately fast machine. Interesting points and tips: - TrueType font embedding did noch affect performance more than you would expect (i/o overhead) - embedding FOP into the application helps a LOT. For most smaller documents, the VM setup costs are huge in proportion to the rendering time. - For server use, I can recommend using the -server option for the SUN VM, though the performance increase was minor (<10%) for my test cases. - I have found NO memory leaks of any kind while using FOP. For those jobs, where the document content is relative fixed (2-page with changes in text for each doc), my server can run days within the same VM instance, constantly formatting, producing 6000 PDFs per hour, with a maximum memory use of 25M (including VM). This is GOOD NEWS. Summary of my FOP experience: - some bugs/missing features (takes some time to find out which FO markup works and which doesn't) - documents with lots (read: LOTS, like 200+x pages) of text can only be rendered with immense amount of main memory. This is probably being addressed in the redesign. Right now, it can be a real showstopper. BUT - good performance - perfect stability in server use - source code - good and active development community (THANKS!) So, overall, FOP developers: Thank you for a great job. Arnd Beissner -- Cappelino Informationstechnologie GmbH Arnd Beißner Bahnhofstr. 3, 71063 Sindelfingen, Germany Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +49-7031-463458 Fax: +49-7031-463460 Mobile: +49-173-3016917 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
