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The "PDF from Hell" Challenge

Friday, 12 January 2007 by Michel Roth

Jeroen van de Kamp has written an blog entry on the Logon Consultants blog that as much sad as it is funny. What do I mean? Well, like most of you might know, some files get extremely bloated when they printed. This of course is a bad thing in Server Based Computing environments, especially if user are connecting over a WAN. Anyway, read for yourself:

"...So what can happen if you open the "PDF from Hell"?

� Adobe acrobat reader eats a lot of memory, easily surpassing 150MB on the workstation or Citrix/Terminal server.
� Document browsing is very slow and causes huge spikes in CPU.
� In TS/Citrix environments PDF information is send completely as huge bitmaps & graphics, causing severe degradation of the user experience in low-bandwidth environments. Browsing through a document will generate much more ICA/RDP traffic than a browsing trough a regular Word document, eating all available WAN bandwidth.
� A PDF print job can be overwhelmingly large, causing a huge load on CPU + Memory + Hard Disk usage and especially Network usage. This is why PDF printing in TS/Citrix WAN environment is often a primary cause of performance issues.

Well, I think I stumbled upon the "PDF from Hell", while I was following a discussion about the F-22 fighter jet (yes, I like flying machines). It is very interesting to see how this PDF behaves on workstations and Citrix/Terminal Server.

Some stats (using Acrobat Reader 8.x on my laptop)

� Memory a couple of seconds after opening the doc: 80MB
� Memory after browsing extensively: 150MB
� Memory after printing : 216 MB
� CPU 100% for a couple of seconds while browsing to the next page.
� Starting a Printjob: 100% CPU for about 2 minutes
� Printjob spoolfile size: a whopping 741MB!!..."

This of course is very sad ... but the cool part is that Jeroen has dared anyone to find a PDF that's creeps up from an even darker, hotter place in "Hell". I'm prepared to take the challenge!

Read the entire blog entry here.