GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 635449
Search in Large PDFs is slow
Last modified: 2018-05-22 14:05:43 UTC
When searching the PDF file the response was extremely slow. The file is a large catalogue downloaded from: http://gb.mouser.com/CatalogRequest/CatalogDownloads.aspx Select catalogue with index from this page. I installed Okular and got immediate search results - as I expected with evince I am running Ubuntu !0.04 with 4GB RAM, Intel I3 and SSD 'hard drive'. I have /tmp in tmpfs size=1024m.
Hi, thanks for reporting this. The problem is that the document has more than 1000 pages and evince search's algorithm is linear on the number of pages! In addition to that, we search in advance all pages, which for a large document like this, it is very slow.
Thanks Jose for explaining this to me and for your quick response. I guess Gnome/Evince will be put under more stress as more people use it. I wonder if this bug should be added to the task, 'Further performance work; probably mostly backend specific,' in the Evince road map. The apparent performance of Okular shows significant improvement may be feasible and some useful code may exist (Of course it may have tradeoffs elsewhere - I am not a developer I am afraid).
I added a patch in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694836 that improves the search performance. I filed a new given that the search result is not immediate, but it goes in that direction.
(In reply to comment #1) > The problem is that the document has more than 1000 pages and evince search's > algorithm is linear on the number of pages! In addition to that, we search in > advance all pages, which for a large document like this, it is very slow. The problem with particular document does not seem to be the search, but the rendering. It is only possible to start searching once evince has finished the render (at least) of the first page.
Depending on the search the results could be immediate or not. It took me a while to get Evince slow down. I downloaded the document in http://ca.mouser.com/catalog/catalogcad/646/dload/pdf/MOUSER.pdf and did a search for 'amphenol', which is a word in the page 1296.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/190.