File is too big - it can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxCcB4V7CT9mdzJuYnM2dVMwdDg/edit?usp=sharing

43 secs? on which hardware/OS?

it renders in 472msec here.

Hi Albert!

I have a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 4GB, Win7SP1 x64 build, my poppler build is also x64. The render code that I use is the following:
--------------------------------------------
	SplashColor bgColor;
	bgColor[0] = bgColor[1] = bgColor[2] = 255;
	SplashOutputDev splash(splashModeXBGR8, 4, gFalse, bgColor, gTrue, gTrue, splashThinLineDefault, gFalse);

	splash.setVectorAntialias(gTrue);
	splash.setFreeTypeHinting(gTrue, gTrue);

	splash.startDoc(pDoc);      

	pDoc->displayPageSlice(&splash, iPage, 72, 72, 0, false, true, false, -1, -1, -1, -1);
--------------------------------------------

note XBGR8 mode. Could that be the case, or x64 build? I can produce more precise profiling measures if you like.

Windows? Try it on Linux

He didn't come back to us, let's assume he found out what was wrong.

Yes, I manually changed the call in GfxFont::readEmbFontFile to

buf = (char*)str->toUnsignedChars(len, 65536, 65536);

and it became much faster.