Ubuntu 12.04’s ghostscript v. 9 is 10–20 times slower than v. 8
Recently I’ve migrated huge rails app to Amazon Opsworks which support Amazon Linux and Ubuntu. My customers started to whine about the time that it takes to process their pdfs. I did some research and it came out that ghostscript version 9.05 that is the only available version on apt-get.
I was using this PDF for benchmarks .
This is benchmark for ghostscript 8.71 installed on Debian Squeeze. It takes 0.165s to process the file.
[code language=”shell”]
root@app2:/tmp# time gs -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 “-sDEVICE=pbmraw” -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 “-r72x72” -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 “-sOutputFile=/tmp/magick-gY9GM5s6-%08d” -dNumRenderingThreads=8 -f ABC_Birgitte.pdf
real 0m0.165s
user 0m0.144s
sys 0m0.020s
[/code]
Below we see it’s opponent — ghostscript 9.05 installed on Ubuntu 12.04: 10.3 s
[code language=”shell”]
root@chili-pepper:/home/ubuntu# time gs -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 “-sDEVICE=pbmraw” -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 “-r72x72” -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 “-sOutputFile=/tmp/magick-gY9GM5s6-%08d” -dNumRenderingThreads=8 -dNOGC -dBandBufferSpace=500000000 -dBufferSpace=1000000000 -f ABC_Birgitte.pdf
real 0m10.334s
user 0m10.249s
sys 0m0.088s
[/code]
Last but not least — ghostscript 9.05 installed on Ubuntu 12.04 from sources. 50% faster than identical version patched by Ubuntu developers: 5.3s
[code language=”shell”]
root@chili-pepper:/home/ubuntu# time gs -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 “-sDEVICE=pbmraw” -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 “-r72x72” -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 “-sOutputFile=/tmp/magick-gY9GM5s6-%08d” -dNumRenderingThreads=8 -dNOGC -dBandBufferSpace=500000000 -dBufferSpace=1000000000 -f ABC_Birgitte.pdf
real 0m5.324s
user 0m5.141s
sys 0m0.088s
[/code]
And the winner is “gs-910-linux_x86_64” version 9.07 which is a ghostscript vanilla binary downloaded from the site 1.2s (which is still almost 10 times slower than in ghostscript 8.71 though)
[code language=”shell”]
root@chili-pepper:/home/ubuntu# time gs -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 “-sDEVICE=pbmraw” -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 “-r72x72” -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 “-sOutputFile=/tmp/magick-gY9GM5s6-%08d” -dNumRenderingThreads=8 -dNOGC -dBandBufferSpace=500000000 -dBufferSpace=1000000000 -f ABC_Birgitte.pdf
real 0m1.234s
user 0m1.121s
sys 0m0.248s
[/code]
Conclusion: Ubuntu 12.04 ghostscript in version 9.05 has very very very poor performance.
