I agree that performance is a difficult problem, so I put a lot of effort into making this test application so that you can easily profile our case. I also made sure to make this test application adaptable, so that you can profile other cases for other kinds of user as well. If I had sourcecode, this is exactly the application I would use to debug this performance issue. In fact, I used this application to try different image layout strategies to see if I could optimize it at my end, but Aspose was consistently extremely slow.
It’s fairly common to use PDF as a “portfolio” of sorts to hold a collection of images. This use-case is well-suited to a streaming approach - there aren’t any complex page layout constraints.
For reference, Word is able to export the DOCX file to PDF in 5 seconds (12x faster) with no noticeable change in memory consumption. Requiring 1.8GB of heap to generate a 40MB document represents a memory overhead of 40x.
I’m sure that if an engineer runs this test application in a debugger, he/she will be able to spot low-hanging fruit fairly quickly. Can you let me know when you’ve had a chance to run the test application? I think it will make it easy for you to make progress on this problem for us and for other users who are interested in using your software for graphical report generation.
Btw, we’re very happy with the quality of your product and your support, and don’t mean to rush you! I just want to make sure that this test application doesn’t slip through the cracks, as I believe it is likely to be a helpful testbench.