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Is it normal that Evince is really slow with pdf documents with pictures and larger than 10 Mb? Instead of loading the whole document and then being able to scroll fast I always get slow page-preview-scrolling and slow document scrolling. Even pages I have scrolled to before in one session have to be constantly reloaded. Is this normal? Is there a way to improve this?

Update 1:

I don't have any other performance issues in other applications (e.g. GIMP, Inkscape, QGIS). I have a laptop with a Intel Core i3-3120M CPU @ 2.50GHz × 4, but only 4 Gb of RAM. Is that not enough RAM for Ubuntu 14.04 and Evince?

Update 2:

Both qpdfview and mupdf are really fast (instantaneous) in document scrolling and page-preview-scrolling. I will try to reinstall Evince or find a ppa for a newer version and update the question after those steps.

Update 3:

Reinstalling hasn't helped even from the gnome ppa. I guess I will have to wait for one of these bugs to be dealt with:

tobias47n9e
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    Do you notice performance issues also on other "graphics heavy" applications such as games? Or is it specific to Evince? – Andrea Lazzarotto Aug 17 '14 at 15:07
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    Have you tried opening the images with image viewer or shotwell? – Tim Aug 17 '14 at 15:32
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    "Pages I visited before" are you sure this is Evince, not Firefox javascript viewer? – Captain Giraffe Aug 17 '14 at 15:34
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    I am sure I am using Evince and I need to do a lot of text searching so opening with image program is not an option. – tobias47n9e Aug 17 '14 at 15:36
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    @Spießbürger Are the issues you are experiencing restricted to specific documents or are you seeing these slowdowns across the board? Have you tried out other PDF viewers like qpdfview, okular or mupdf? Same experience there? – Glutanimate Aug 17 '14 at 18:07
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    Opening with another program is not just talking about an alternative - it is also to diagnose whether the problem belongs to evince, or rather belongs to the combo your machine + a specific version of ubutnu or some library or system package, etc. So please do it and report the results. – ignis Aug 17 '14 at 20:29

2 Answers2

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There is no solution for Evince yet (2016). But you can use Okular (free software, available in your package manager), and change the settings of the viewer to greedy (Settings -> Configure Okular -> Performance -> Greedy) which will load all pages. You can then skip forward and back as fast as you want, the pages are displayed at once!

erik
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I think it is a bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645796 - Evince has performance problems with large/complicated pdfs.

sup
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