GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 768436
Evince is too slow with large PDF
Last modified: 2017-08-15 14:38:02 UTC
I try to work on a 500 pages pdf, but evince is too slow. When I want to navigate through the document, it takes seconds to display the pages and the side panel. I think the trouble comes from the cache size. I have enough memory for loading the whole document in once, but for some reason, evince never uses more than ~50Mio of memory. I modified the cache size of evince: gsettings set org.gnome.Evince page-cache-size 3000 but it seems to be for only one page, not the whole document, since the problem was not solved: the pages are reloaded even if I already looked at them. For example, when I navigate from page 100 to page 200, and then again to page 100, the pages take seconds to reload. The size of the pdf is 16.7 Mo. I am using evince 3.20 on Debian testing.
It may be a particular issue with the a particular document. For example, the 'PDF 1.7 Reference'[1] has 1310 pages, it has a size 32.5 MB, and it does not seem to be slow. [1] https://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html However, the issue may be the side pane when is set to the 'Outline'. Try closing the side pane or switching to something else (thumbnails, layers, annotations, etc.)
I'm an adjunct math instructor, and use Evince to search through documents like instructor solutions manuals. My current one is 878 pages, but only 4.3 MB. If I leave the sidebar with thumbnails on, I almost can't scroll; the system seems to take forever to catch up. If I close the side panel, everything runs much more quickly, and I'm able to scroll using the side bar and page up/page down. Opening the side panel with a search also allows the scrolling to work quickly, so the slowness is something related to the thumbnail function. I find the thumbnails useful for helping to find the solution to a particular problem by for example helping me to scroll through graphs. I have a similar problem trying to find specific articles in online magazines in pdf format. A solution would be much appreciated, and thanks for reading this.
Michael, could you provide the document so that developers have a test case?
Thanks for taking the time to report this. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade provided by your Linux distribution. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 691448 ***