>>The memory requirements depend on the complexity of the >>layout (tables spanning multiple pages are bad), how big >>included graphics are (they are all held in memory), and, >>often the worst of all, whether you are using forward >>references, like the popular "page x of y" (which forces >>all pages and dependent data to be held in memory until >>rendering is finished).
>>I've been able to render 500 Page books without problems. Very true. The past few weeks we've been building a prototype to see if FOP would serve our needs. We've done some testing to see how big of a report we could make. Within a servlet environment, the biggest PDF we've created was 12,443 pages (really!) representing 74,350 database records. We avoided forward references and insert page-sequences every so often to avoid memory problems. We also used SAX events instead of DOM to create the appropriate XML. The down side is this humongous report took 1 hour 40 minutes to render on a 700 MHz Win2000/Intel server. Most "normal" sized reports only take 1-2 minutes.
