better support for multicore platforms
Submitted by Paul Millar
Assigned to poppler-bugs
Description
Historically, computers have achieved increased performance by some combination of increasing CPU clock-frequency and CPU complexity. In recent years, this tread has abated, with modern computers achieving increased performance by having multiple independent cores, with each core showing only modest improvements to performance over time. Therefore, for software to show an increase in performance, it is increasingly important that the software be able to spread its load over several CPU cores.
I believe that, currently, poppler is limited to single-threaded rendering. While this helps keep the code simple, the performance (against the platform's potential) suffers.
This bug requests that poppler be extended to include support multi-threaded rendering. This would allow poppler to utilise all the cores concurrently, so drastically decrease the time take to render each page of a document on a modern computer.
Cheers,
Paul.