EXP Systems Forum: PDF reDirect v1.2 slow when not C: drive

Message

   I am evalulating PDF direct v1.2 on Windows XP professional. When I print to PDFredirect a 7 page Word document (containing no images, but lots of tables) then if the document is saved to the C: drive then the conversion takes a few seconds. When it is a network drive then it will take at least 30 minutes! This also happens when the network drive is offline and cached via the Windows synchronisation feature.

I have tried this on a NT4.0 system which had a C and D drive. Printing to a PDF on D drive was several times slower than the C drive. 

Is this a feature, which is removed by registering or the professional version?

Thanks

Andy

Author	Message
andywa Newbie Joined: 10 Feb 04 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 2	Topic: PDF reDirect v1.2 slow when not C: drive Posted: 10 Feb 04 at 6:29AM
	I am evalulating PDF direct v1.2 on Windows XP professional. When I print to PDFredirect a 7 page Word document (containing no images, but lots of tables) then if the document is saved to the C: drive then the conversion takes a few seconds. When it is a network drive then it will take at least 30 minutes! This also happens when the network drive is offline and cached via the Windows synchronisation feature. I have tried this on a NT4.0 system which had a C and D drive. Printing to a PDF on D drive was several times slower than the C drive. Is this a feature, which is removed by registering or the professional version? Thanks Andy
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Michel_K17 Moderator Group Forum Administrator Joined: 25 Jan 03 Posts: 1673	Posted: 10 Feb 04 at 3:41PM
	Hi Andywa, I am at a loss to explain the slowdown when writing to a network drive. I re-tested writing to my "network" drive (via the standard "File Sharing") from my Win XP Pro computer to a shared folder on a Win 98 computer mapped in the Win XP machine as drive "T". I saw no change in the time required to create the PDF file, which makes sense because the bottleneck in the creation of the PDF file is the data transfer from the Windows "Printer Spool" system to PDF reDirect, which is typically considerably slower than writing to disk. I would like to re-assure you as well: there are no disabling of features in the free version of PDF reDirect v1.2. "Free" means "free" in my books. :-) You could try PDF reDirect Pro to see if there is a difference: the process is different in that a temporary file is created first, and then transferred to the final destination. That may give you better performance in case you are being affected by some sort of latency problem. (The intermediate file is to allow the user to make changes to the settings before creating the final PDF file). If you are interested in pursuing this problem further, I can send you a modified "beta test" version of PDF reDirect. With this custom code, we can try to pin down where the slowdown occurs. Best Regards,
	Michel Korwin-Szymanowski EXP Systems LLC
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andywa Newbie Joined: 10 Feb 04 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 2	Posted: 19 Feb 04 at 1:53AM
	Thanks Michel. Apologies for my late reply. I have done a few more tests. The network drive is slow, very slow.. about 150Kbs. Directing the PDF files to this drive seems to cause the problem. The PDF application will contine running for up to a hour with the progress bar becoming stuck at about 75%. Strangely enough, the resultant PDF file looks complete long before this but sometimes it is locked. When I did the test on a fast network drive there was no problem. The PDF was complete within several seconds. I think my tests on the NT 4.0 machine were mistaken. Maybe the slow network causes some contention problem with the code? Regards Andy
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Michel_K17 Moderator Group Forum Administrator Joined: 25 Jan 03 Posts: 1673	Posted: 19 Feb 04 at 6:08AM
	Thank you for the reply, and the testing. I modified the progress bar very slightly to add the "close" button so that at least you can get rid of the progress bar if it seems to get stuck. It was released as "PDF reDirect v1.2.2" Edited by Michel_K17
	Michel Korwin-Szymanowski EXP Systems LLC
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