PDF Expert using too much RAM

[Tanyaviola]

I've been using PDF Expert for a month or so and it's been great. All of a sudden I opened it today and it was VERY slow and then my mac gave me a warning that I was running out of app memory. I opened Activity Monitor and I saw it was using 80+GB! It rose very quickly from the moment I opened a document to edit....at 1 GB, then 2, etc. This has never happened before and I'm not sure what's causing it. I sent them (Readdle) an email and hopefully we can figure it out because I have a lot of work I need to do but just can't use it at this point.

Thanks,
T.
2019 iMac 27-inch
3.7 GHz Intel Core i5
40 GB DDR4
macOS Mojave (10.14.6)

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Does the situation continue after a restart?

Just about anything may misbehave once - some random series of occurrences, a particular document with corrupted data... The better question is whether the issue repeats.

Is it more important for you to know what went wrong, or is it more important to be able to do the work?

If this is a mission-critical app, perhaps it's necessary to put everything on hold, preserve the current operating state, and immediately open an investigation. However, for most people it's enough to restart and get on with their work. If the same issue shows up repeatedly, then there's a pattern of failure that may justify an investigation.

 

[Tanyaviola]

Does the situation continue after a restart?

Just about anything may misbehave once - some random series of occurrences, a particular document with corrupted data... The better question is whether the issue repeats.

Is it more important for you to know what went wrong, or is it more important to be able to do the work?

If this is a mission-critical app, perhaps it's necessary to put everything on hold, preserve the current operating state, and immediately open an investigation. However, for most people it's enough to restart and get on with their work. If the same issue shows up repeatedly, then there's a pattern of failure that may justify an investigation.

I restarted the app...and I also restarted the computer. Same results. For me, I really need to get the work done....I'm not particularly interested in why this is happening, but obviously I'd like to fix it. Everytime I try to open it now, it happens.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Can you isolate the issue to a particular document?

 

[Tanyaviola]

I just tried it with a different PDF. Same thing. I was hoping it was as easy as a corrupt document or something.

EDIT: I just tried it with a single page document and it was fine. But I've worked with multiple page documents before and it was fine....

 

[Tanyaviola]

UPDATE: I tried opening an entirely different PDF (multiple pages) and it's fine. Maybe that original file was corrupt? I tried splitting it online (ILovePDF) and re-downloading it and trying that "new" file and it still had problems. I guess it's just that particular PDF. I don't know what happened to it. It's totally readable and being used elsewhere. *shrug*

 

[GuilleA]

What happens when you open the misbehaving file with Preview?

 

[jerwin]

Is this document publically accessible?

Does it use JPEG2000 images?

 

[astroboylrx]

This looks like a serious memory leak issue. You should contact their support and send them an example file. I felt like PDF Expert for Mac has lost its best engineer team. The performance of it on vector PDFs has been dropping a lot in these years.

 

[GerritV]

Same issues here. I spoke to Readdle Support about it. Their suggestion was to delete / reinstall the app - in order to empty its massive memory attack.

 

[astroboylrx]

I've been fighting with something similar for quite a while. I guess the file you had a problem with contains lots of vector elements. From my understanding, since PDF Expert version 2, their optimization has shifted its focus from performance to the editing capability. For PDF files with a significant number of vector elements, it takes a huge amount of resources (CPU, memory) to prepare them for editing. (Back in PDF Expert version 1, the software was quite optimized in terms of rendering those vector elements w/o many editing features.) I guess they found PDF files with tons of vector elements are rare among their typical users.

You do need to use Adobe Acrobat to complete such tasks nowadays.

 

[yellow8]

My guess is that this might be a PDFKit (Apple framework) issue.
I have encountered some rare issues with particular PDF files, when developing PDFZone (that uses PDFKit as well).
The problem is often that some authors (companies, often) of PDF generate horrible files. And the PDF format is extremely complicated.