[pdftex] OT: Linux AR 7.0 released: another comment

[Robin Fairbairns]

James Quirk wrote:

> The degradation in performance is alarming: AR 7.0 is seventy five times
> slower than AR 5.1 in turning off 2,000 widgets. This would suggest that 
> Adobe's software testing does not run to checking how well the PD format 
> scales. But this would be in keeping with the picture that Nelson paints.

this tallies with my experience: ar7 under linux is indeed noticeably
slower than ar5.  (it also seems to insist on opening a window when
used as a pdf->ps translator, so we can't use in our print spooler
and are retaining ar5 in that role.)

the interesting thing is that under windows, speed was steadily going
down from ar3 (the first i used) to ar6, but ar7 is far faster than
ar6.  this seems to be because ar6 loaded all dynamic libraries at
startup, whereas ar7 loads them as needed.  it's hard to believe that
this optimisation never occurred to them before, but we know that they
are ***very*** slow to respond to observed bugs.