Ubuntu – Evince performance (Hint: slow)

evince

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:

Best Answer

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!

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Evince default dual view

In Evince click View → Dual (the one with the check mark before) to reenable single view and then go to Edit → Save Current Settings as Default or press Ctrl+T to save these settings.

Ubuntu – how to disable evince-thumbnailer

To disable it system-wide, comment the Exec= line in /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer:

sudo sed -i 's/^Exec=/# &/' /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer

user@user-X550CL ~/tmp % sudo sed -i 's/^Exec=/# &/' /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer
user@user-X550CL ~/tmp % cat /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer
[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=evince-thumbnailer
# Exec=evince-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o
MimeType=application/pdf;application/x-bzpdf;application/x-gzpdf;application/x-xzpdf;application/x-ext-pdf;application/postscript;application/x-bzpostscript;application/x-gzpostscript;image/x-eps;image/x-bzeps;image/x-gzeps;application/x-ext-ps;application/x-ext-eps;application/x-dvi;application/x-bzdvi;application/x-gzdvi;application/x-ext-dvi;image/vnd.djvu;application/x-ext-djv;application/x-ext-djvu;image/tiff;application/x-cbr;application/x-cbz;application/x-cb7;application/x-cbt;application/x-ext-cbr;application/x-ext-cbz;application/x-ext-cb7;application/x-ext-cbt;application/oxps;application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument

To re-enable it, uncomment it again:

sudo sed -i 's/^# \(Exec=\)/\1/' /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer

user@user-X550CL ~/tmp % sudo sed -i 's/^# \(Exec=\)/\1/' /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer
user@user-X550CL ~/tmp % cat /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer
[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=evince-thumbnailer
Exec=evince-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o
MimeType=application/pdf;application/x-bzpdf;application/x-gzpdf;application/x-xzpdf;application/x-ext-pdf;application/postscript;application/x-bzpostscript;application/x-gzpostscript;image/x-eps;image/x-bzeps;image/x-gzeps;application/x-ext-ps;application/x-ext-eps;application/x-dvi;application/x-bzdvi;application/x-gzdvi;application/x-ext-dvi;image/vnd.djvu;application/x-ext-djv;application/x-ext-djvu;image/tiff;application/x-cbr;application/x-cbz;application/x-cb7;application/x-cbt;application/x-ext-cbr;application/x-ext-cbz;application/x-ext-cb7;application/x-ext-cbt;application/oxps;application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument

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