[iText-questions] iText performance vs. pdflib

John Lindwall Tue, 17 Jan 2006 14:25:10 -0800

I write this email in sincerity; not to start a flame war of any kind. We are currently using an old version of pdflib and are looking into switching to iText. The iText library looks very capable and easy to use. I genuinely want to use iText so any help in resolving my issue would be appreciated.

Performance is an issue for us; we want to switch to iText but not give up the speed to which we're accustomed. I'm pasting a small program I used to measure pdflib 4.0.3 (yes we're on an old version) against iText 1.3. The tests were run on my Windows 200 machine.

The program shows iText to be an order of magnitude slower then pdflib. It generates a pdf file with 1000 letter-size pages each having the text "Hello" at coordinate 100, 100. For pdflib we render each page to a memory buffer and write it to disk. For iText I tried writing to a buffered FileWriter AND separately to a ByteArrayOutputStream in memory with the file write occurring at the end of processing. The # of milliseconds each test took is displayed at the end.

Generate big PDF with 1000 pages
Pdflib took 344
iText took 3188
iText to Memory took 2781

I'm not an iText guru by any means -- far from it! I cobbled this code together from the examples. I'm hoping you can spot something inefficient that I'm doing or make suggestions as to improvements I can make to this program.

Again, I'd love to use iText! Please help me use it effectively. Thanks!

package com.system;

import com.pdflib.pdflib;
import com.lowagie.text.Document;
import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;
import com.lowagie.text.Rectangle;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfWriter;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfContentByte;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.BaseFont;

import java.io.*;

public class PdfPerformance
{
private final static float LETTER_WIDTH = 612f;
private final static float LETTER_HEIGHT = 792f;

private static final int PAGECOUNT = 1000;

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, DocumentException
    {
        PdfPerformance perf = new PdfPerformance();

System.out.println("Generate big PDF with " + PAGECOUNT + " pages");

        long pdflibTime    = perf.generateBigPdfUsingPdflib(PAGECOUNT);
        long itextTime     = perf.generateBigPdfUsingIText(PAGECOUNT);
        long itextToMemory = perf.generateBigPdfUsingITextWithBuffer(PAGECOUNT);

        System.out.println("Pdflib took          " + pdflibTime);
        System.out.println("iText took           " + itextTime);
        System.out.println("iText to Memory took " + itextToMemory);
    }

    private long generateBigPdfUsingPdflib(int pagecount) throws IOException
    {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

        pdflib pdflib = new pdflib();
        if (pdflib.open_file("") == -1)
            throw new IOException("Can't open PDF output buffer");

OutputStream os = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("pdflib.pdf", false));

int helv = pdflib.findfont("Helvetica", "host", 0);

        for( int i = 0; i < pagecount; i++ )
        {
            pdflib.begin_page(LETTER_WIDTH, LETTER_HEIGHT);

pdflib.setfont(helv, 10);
pdflib.show_xy("Hello", 100, 100);

            pdflib.end_page();
            os.write(pdflib.get_buffer());
        }

        pdflib.close();
        os.write(pdflib.get_buffer());
        os.close();

return System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
}

    private long generateBigPdfUsingIText(int pagecount) throws IOException, DocumentException
    {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

Document document = new Document();
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("itext.pdf")));

        document.setPageSize(new Rectangle(LETTER_WIDTH, LETTER_HEIGHT));
        document.open();
        PdfContentByte cb = writer.getDirectContent();
        BaseFont bf = BaseFont.createFont(BaseFont.HELVETICA, BaseFont.CP1252, BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED);

        for( int i = 0; i < pagecount; i++ )
        {
            cb.beginText();
            cb.setFontAndSize(bf, 10);
            cb.showTextAligned(PdfContentByte.ALIGN_LEFT, "Hello", 100, 100, 0);
            cb.endText();
            document.newPage();
        }

document.close();

return System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
}

    private long generateBigPdfUsingITextWithBuffer(int pagecount) throws IOException, DocumentException
    {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

Document document = new Document();

        ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, baos);
        OutputStream os = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("itext2.pdf", false));

        document.close();
        os.write(baos.toByteArray());
        os.close();

return System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
}
}

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[iText-questions] iText performance vs. pdflib

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