Slow PDF generation with PHP+DomPDF

Question

I spent a while dealing with a really slow PDF generation process using DomPDF. After a lot of fiddling and googling, I eventually got a solution which I thought I\'d post i

Answer 1

SOLUTION:

After a lot of googling, trial and error, looking up a lot on Stackoverflow (none of the articles I found were really helpful), I figured out that it was bootstrap that was causing the issue.

I was using bootstrap for very basic layout management and I realized that linking the whole library (even the minified one) into the view that was sent to dompdf was overkill, but I didn't want to re-write the view file.

So, I took a different approach: Get the CSS definitions for the specific classes (6, maybe 7) my view was using and inline them in a

and remove bootstrap altogether from the view.

retesting, the results were astonishing: A 100 purchase order (100-page) PDF (less than 60 kB in size) which took between 30-60 seconds to be generated and streamed to the user before the change, is now being generated in less than half a second, which confirmed that linking bootstrap produces a HUGE overhead on dompdf which is probably unnecesary in 99% of use cases.

Hope this helps someone. It took quite a few days of work to figure this out.