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Why does Adobe Acrobat take 15 minutes to open a PDF?
59 points by thinkcomp on June 7, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments
I do a lot of graphic design work. I have over 2,000 fonts. (Yes, I do use them.) Adobe Acrobat routinely takes 10 to 15 minutes (I'm not exaggerating) to open up a PDF file, whether it uses 1, 2, 10, 100 or no fonts at all. According to FileMon from Microsoft, it's because Acrobat loads every single font on my system before rendering the file. This makes no sense--especially because if I were to actually try to use one of those fonts not already embedded in the document by editing the file, it would re-load them all over again.

Some time is also spent reading and updating a local MySQL database called the "organizer." I've never used the Acrobat organizer. Not once. I suspect 99.999% of Acrobat users don't even know it's there, yet every time I open a PDF, I wait for it. There's no way to clear it except by manually locating the files it uses on your filesystem and deleting them.

Unrelated but equally infuriating: Acrobat insists on printing 100% black rectangles (meaning 0% C, 0% M, 0% Y, 100% K) as a mixture of C M and Y ink on my Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N color laser printer. Illustrator prints the same exact PDF file properly using only black ink on the same printer.

Can someone from Adobe explain to me why this is reasonable? I've paid Adobe thousands of dollars over the year for its products. When can I expect to open a PDF in 2 seconds or less like I could with Acrobat 3.0 on my 100MHz Pentium ten years ago? When will Acrobat actually work?

(Before you say, "Use Preview!" know that I've already tried. It doesn't render my PDFs properly. It rasterizes things that shouldn't be rasterized and it draws lines that aren't there. Adobe made the PDF spec, I like PDFs, and I want to use Adobe's software.)



This is Ryan Damico from crocodoc (YC Winter 2010), an online app for marking up and reviewing PDF files (as well as other document types). One of the reasons we started crocodoc is that Adobe's tools for working with PDF files (including Reader) are way behind the times (e.g. slow, desktop based, difficult to collaborate).

That said, crocodoc is still early in development and has some kinks of its own we're working on, but we think there's a lot of room for innovation in this space. Would love to hear any feedback!

crocodoc demo: http://crocodoc.com/demo


Cool concept, marking-up documents is big business. Legal depts we negotiated licenses with would always do it by emailing a Word doc, with its diff/review feature that looks very nice, and comments. My book publisher also used it for reviewer feedback.

Unsolicited feedback: It looks beautiful!

It's much slower than google gview and scribd (but they don't allow annotations, so it's apples/oranges... but still). Why don't you pre-scan the demo document? I know it's cheating, but it gives a better first impression (and, to me, it would feel reasonable if my own document took a few moments longer to process than the demo. Best foot forward etc).

I wish you'd have an "upload doc" textfield prominently on the demo page - without it, I assumed you had to open an account; it was just luck that I happened to read the FAQ saying that you could. But it didn't say how, so I'm scratching my head. Luckily, I tried going to the front page, there it was. You're making me think too much, just to get started, which is an easy place to lose someone: I think you're losing trials by not having it on the demo page either - that's the natural place for a "load" document.

Also, Your style of upload file/URL form is popular, but I really think there must be a better way! Perhaps one textfield, with two buttons (upload and file browse). You enter your doc, file or web, and the uploader sorts it out; the file browser is just a convenience. Maybe also have a google search, if people don't have the URL immediately on hand (must be a common case).


Thanks for the constructive feedback -- your comments are very helpful. If you ever feel like telling us more about what we can do to make crocodoc a no-brainer to use, drop us an email through our site :)


I looks very good, but maybe you should consider a HTML5 version and not (only) Flash.


Ryan, that's great. I have been working on something similar for many of the same reasons you mentioned. Check this out: http:/www.pdfamigo.com I think you may find it interesting.


I am sure you software is great, but kicking me out because i am running flash player 9 tells me you don't want me as a customer.


> way behind the times (e.g. ... desktop based

You're totally right. Google needs to really step up to the plate and finally make a web-based version of Chrome/Chromium...


Also, why is there always a new version of Acrobat Reader to install? Also, why does adobe launch a relatively huge app to detect and tell me this whenever I'm in the middle of doing something important. It's like it knows "Oh, the system is under a lot of load already, I should fire up now since the user is clearly at his computer"

I only have Adobe Reader installed to handle fill in form apps (IE, passport renewal). In the past, I've manually deleted the adobe autoupdater from my system to avoid the slow downs. It's worse than spyware.


I use foxit, for generic PDF viewing, also SumatraPDF is a whole lot quick too. I've never installed Adobe Reader in over 3-4 years and haven't missed it so far.


I can't count how many times friends/family have thanked me when I introduced them to Foxit. They couldn't believe how fast it is. Truly an amazing product.


SumatraPDF is fantastic. Fastest PDF viewer I've ever used.


Sumatra is nice, but Preview on OS X is even faster. It loads PDF documents as if they were text documents.


It appears Adobe isn't interested in making software anymore. Flash is slow, Acrobat is slow and Photoshop will refuse to work for completely arbitrary reasons (like having a case sensitive filesystem).

Guys, looks like Adobe could use some competition :p


Check couple of things:

- Use procmon, not filemon - enable durations.

- Use dependancy walker, load the acrobat executable from there. Check all checkboxes on. Press F7


Hey, can you expand on the tools to be used for investigating a resource hog? Bit off topic, but I feel that my system crawls with Firefox or Chrome in spite of having 4 G of RAM. How do I go about investigating what is the actual bottleneck?


Hi paraschopra,

There are many tools, depending on what you are doing (io, network, memory, cpu). In my case, the problems are with the tools written by us for our studio, so we just use our own profilers that the tools are compiled with (check DEJA, DressCode).

It's only for code where we don't have source code, or we don't have time to put profiling probes then we use external tools - for example VerySleepy for sampling, or some of the SysInternals tools.

But sometimes the answer is just few clicks of google, or serverfault.com / userfault.com, etc.


Well acrobat loads not just fonts but a whole bunch of plugins, some of them unused or unnecessary for most users. If you remove those plugins (you will have to manually delete them from the acrobat folder - Google for it), you should notice a dramatic increase in loading times. (I have tried this and it works as advertised)


Seems like Acrobat jumped the shark a few versions back.

It's a monster.

Sounds like you need to use some font management software, though, which will allow you to load up sets as you need them, rather than having them always available.


I'm downloading some kind of font manager from Extensis right now. I was thinking I'd just use the copy of ATM Deluxe I have (and paid for) somewhere...except that it doesn't support Windows XP. And Adobe discontinued it five years ago.

Brilliant.


I would always use font management.

No one uses 2000 fonts at the same time and with font management you can group them into different categories. Also if they are needed most applications will ask for them and activate them. So no need to keep them active all the time.

I seem to remember that windows would take longer to load if my font folder where filled with stuff but I might be wrong (it might have been the amount of files I left on my desktop)

Personally I prefer Linotype FontExplorerX http://www.fontexplorerx.com/

It exist as a free version too which is normally more then you need.


Actually recent versions of Acrobat have been rather snappy for me.

+1 for font management software. Yes, its a hackish solution, but if it works, then...


Yes, recent versions are snappy. I run Acrobat Pro 9.3.2 on Mac OS X and launch time isn't an issue. Acrobat delay-loads plug-ins, so the plug-in issue is mitigated.

I don't doubt the font-induced launch time delays, however. I think I've heard this one before.

Did you report the printing bug to Adobe?


Don't know about the color printing issue, but I use Sumatra PDF reader instead of Adobe Reader for 95%+ of my PDF reading:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

It's free, and it's light, and it's fast. And it doesn't bother you at inopportune times asking whether you want to upgrade. Given that, why would you want to use Adobe's software?

Every now and again a document won't render correctly, and then I'll use Acrobat Reader--which sometimes also fails to render it correctly. But what can you do.


Well, it's not two-seconds fast, but it's better than 15 minutes. Thanks!


Huh?

Before you say, "Use Preview!" know that I've already tried. It doesn't render my PDFs properly. It rasterizes things that shouldn't be rasterized and it draws lines that aren't there. Adobe made the PDF spec, I like PDFs, and I want to use Adobe's software.

I thought you were running OS X, and that alternative PDF viewers didn't work for you because they didn't adhere to the PDF specs as strictly as Acrobat.


I didn't say that. I'm running Windows on my primary machine and Mac OS on my office machines. Preview in particular doesn't do a very good job.


http://dearadobe.com


Adobe bashing is quite a trend but in this case I'm pretty sure that it's not Acrobat per se which causing the slowness. Last time when I've seen a similar case some corrupted fonts were the core of the problem, but your hardware setup, OS, filesystem, number of files are also more likely to blame than Adobe.


Try to use foxit reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/) It's ultra fast. I use this product for a couple of years and forgot about the acrobat reader as a nightmare.


Use a small trusty that does not phone home:

http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html


... and is full of known security holes. No thanks.


The OP is using Acrobat for graphics design, not for online-PDF reading. I don't think he has to worry about security holes that he or his coworkers can exploit.


But you have to actively disable the plugins Acrobat installs for online reading or else your browsers are wide open. Lots of bad sites (and ads) launch malicious PDF files that you never see.


As long as you only use it for "trusted" documents, old versions should be fine. But you can, for instance, never install it as the "default" PDF reader on an internet-connected system.


Seems like you forgot to open scanned PDF files. It will take years to scroll one page.


I think this was one of Zucker's feature requests.




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