Large PDF Creation -- limits?

[blewis]

I am working on a script that creates PDFs by taking a single page PDF template, uses ClonePage to append it to a new gdPDF and draws some text and a barcode on the page (then repeats for each record in the datatable passed in). Currently I have tested it for a few dozen records, but I know some users are going to need to go big (like a few thousand pages). Are there any limits in gdPicture that I should be aware of when building these large PDFs? Is it strictly memory bound? I assume the entire PDF will be in memory as it's being built, right? The server this script will run on typically has 4-5GB of free memory on average (out of 12GB total)...but I was just curious what I should possibly watch for when trying to scale this script.

Thanks,
Bryan

[Loïc]

Hi,

It's impossible to provide a reply.
This depends on how you created your PDF, on its content, on the previous actions done, on the Virtual Memory configuration of the system, on the system version itself, on the state of the garbage collector etc...

What I can tell so far is the PDF engine take care of the memory consumption and tried to determine the best approach to cache data on hard disk or memory. So you can expect to be able to produce large documents, larger than the free memory available in certain cases. In a future release we will be able to say: The only limit is your hard disk space.

Let me know if you need further information.

Kind regards,

Loïc

[blewis]

Loic,

I know that it was a hard question...I was just seeking some general guidance. I will ramp up my testing and see how it goes. Just knowing the fact that gd does use the disk as cache is useful info.

Bryan