I’m having trouble with pdfs loading slowly or hanging. I’m currently using the pdf embed plugin. Sometimes pdfs will load faster than other times, or not at all. I’ve raised a ticket with my host server, and their response was:
"we suspect that they are having issues being pre-loaded by the application. PDF’s aren’t normally cached, which means that each access will generate a page file, if you will for the pdf in question which takes a lot of time to conduct in a query process and allocates a lot of resources to do so.
The slow load time for the PDF’s can also be accounted due to routing through the plugin in question not processing the query quickly. Unfortunately there is no way for us to concretely say as we are not website developers. Strongly advise to consult with a certified web developer to have this properly reviewed so they can assist accordingly."
Has anyone had similar issues and been able to resolve them?
Any rhyme or reason to which PDFs are slow, like size of the file? Any relation to the time it takes to simply download the file? If it’s varying significantly over time the simple answer is probably that the host itself is slow at those times and PDFs are simply your larger files where slow speeds are more noticeable.
The PDF Embed plugin doesn’t do any “generating” of the PDF, it just serves existing uploaded files. If you’re using the PDF.js option, your browser will render the PDF with Javascript, which could be slow for large or complex PDFs, but that’s something your client machine does so it should be pretty consistent over time.
Thanks for your response. Yep, it must be a hosting issue. I’m getting around it by using Flowpaper and iframing all documents. Much more user-friendly too!
Your help is much appreciated - Omeka rocks my world.