Bug 91248

Hello,

Certain PDFs opened in Evince or Atril using the Poppler backend are extremely slow to render, to the point of being unusable. This is on a very fast Thinkpad laptop with a quad-core processor and an SSD. The same PDFs render instantly using a Windows PDF reader (http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer) (running under Wine!!).

I can't include all of the many files that I've observed this problem on for privacy/copyright reasons, but I was able to find that most of the ones from here exhibit the problem:
https://archive.org/details/ualbertaeducationguides
For example, this file is only about 2MB, but it takes many seconds to render each page:
https://ia600705.us.archive.org/26/items/kindergartencatho11albe/kindergartencatho11albe.pdf
Another small file:
https://freekidsbooks.org/download/103
These particular PDFs are all scanned books, i.e. only images with no actual text. But I have also observed this same extreme slowness in certain mixed text/image PDF files.

On the other hand, some long, complex PDFs with images render extremely quickly with Poppler, like this one:
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/paying-taxes/pdf/pwc-paying-taxes-2015-high-resolution.pdf

Thanks for looking into this.