TCPDF twice as slow as FPDF with same code

Question

I currently use FPDF to create some fairly complicated reports and am trying to upgrade to TCPDF, but I've found that my same code running through TCPDF is about twice as slow. Because my PDFs already take up to a minute to generate I can't really afford to have this slowdown, but I'd really like to take advantage of some TCPDF features (like creating bookmarks).

If anyone has some information on this problem I'd really appreciate it - either things you did to make TCPDF faster, or just confirmation that it runs slower than FPDF, so I can forget about it and just stick with FPDF.

Answer 1

Here is a sweet solution, shaves 2 minutes for me. PDFs are created in 3 seconds!

http://www.bitrealm.net/2010/08/tcpdf-is-slow-here-is-the-solution/

Replace

$font = $this->_getTrueTypeFontSubset($font, $subsetchars);

with this:

/ Alcal: $font2cache modification
// This modification creates utf-8 fonts only the first time,
// after that it uses cache file which dramatically reduces execution time
if (!file_exists($fontfile.'.cached')){
// calculate $font first time
$subsetchars = array_fill(0, 512, true); // fill subset for all chars 0-512
$font = $this->_getTrueTypeFontSubset($font, $subsetchars); // this part is actually slow!
// and then save $font to file for further use
$fp=fopen($fontfile.'.cached','w');
$flat_array = serialize($font); //
fwrite($fp,$flat_array);
fclose($fp);
}
else {
// cache file exist, load file
$fp=fopen($fontfile.'.cached','r');
$flat_array = fread($fp,filesize($fontfile.'.cached'));
fclose($fp);
$font = unserialize($flat_array);
}

Answer 2

http://www.tcpdf.org/performances.php

By default TCPDF enables font subsetting to reduce the size of embedded Unicode TTF fonts, this process, that is very slow and requires a lot of memory, can be turned off using setFontSubsetting(false) method;

This was the real solution for me.

Answer 3

Since version 5.9.067 TCPDF performances were drastically improved. Each new release seems performing better. Additionally you can set it to boost performances as explained at http://www.tcpdf.org/performances.php

Answer 4

TCPDF performances can be tuned by disabling unused features on the configuration file and turn off slow features like font subsetting. Using only core fonts (like Helvetica, Times, ...) in non-UTF8 mode you can get good performances. Additionally you can install XCache on you server to boost PHP performances. Check the official http://www.tcpdf.org website and forums for further information.