PDF iFilter Test, with SharePoint 2010

[update Adobe PDF iFilter result] 

Recently Foxit updated their PDF iFilter 2.0. An interesting improvement is “optimized for multi-core processor”. It claims that you can get 3 times better performance compared with its own version 1.0. Let’s see how my test result goes.

Machine:

Dell 2950 (I bought this two years ago)

2 x quad core Intel Xeon E5410 @ 2.33GHz, 8GB Memory, 3 x 10000 rpm HD RAID 5

File set:

22,559 PDF Files in 84 folders, 15.7 GB total, from People’s Daily Archive

Content Source:

File Share, on the same machine, to avoid network latency and bottlenecks

Software Platform

Windows Server 2008 R2

SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov CTP

SharePoint Server 2010 Beta

Foxit PDF iFilter 2.0 x64

TET PDF iFIlter 3.0 x64

Adobe PDF iFilter 9.0 x64

After each crawl, reset index, restart osearch14 service.

Test Result – update Adobe PDF iFilter result

Vendor

Crawl Time(h:m:s)

Crawl Time(s)

File Per Second

Success(including warning)

Error

Foxit 0:13:00 780 29.02 22637 0
TET 1:17:44 4664 5.07 22637 0
Adobe 8:29:43 30583 0.74 22637 0

Amazing! The full crawl was done in just 13 minutes. If you still remember the last test I did, Foxit version 1.0 got 10.73 files per second on SharePoint 2007 x64 with the same hardware spec.

Adobe PDF iFilter is single threaded. Only one CPU core was working during the full indexing process.

Here’re the screenshots of the CPU usage…

Vendor

Screenshots

Comment

Foxit snap0012 Foxit PDF iFilter 2 is able to use multiple cores. Most of the time CPU usage is at around 90%.
TET snap0013 TET PDF iFilter 3 is also able to use multiple cores. CPU usage is 100% all the time.
Adobe snap0015 Adobe PDF iFilter 9 is single threaded. It can only use one core of the machine.

Nice job, Foxit!

Jie.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    Pingback from : www.sosp.fr/.../Post.aspx

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2010
    I just LOVE it when an "upstart" crushes the 800lb. Gorilla! Adobe needs to step up their game.

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2010
    Thanks for this article!

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2010
    I will your article and I like foxit PDF IFilter

  • Anonymous
    March 29, 2012
    Two years later, does this behavior in the latest Adobe's Ifilter is still true ? thx

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2012
    Two years later and Adobe is still a Gorilla and is still on version 9; I have seen that it uses more then one core.

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2013
    Hello, I made the same test on VM with SharePoint 2010 SP1 december 2012 CU. 2 cpu with 2 core and 6gb ram. 7442 pdf doc for 7,5 Gb. I test with Adobe ifilter 9 and 11, foxit ifilter 2.20 and tet ifilter 3.0 and all ifilter have the "same time" for crawl. Can you help to explain that ?? Regards

  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2013
    @Mysonemo - if you found the results are all the same, that means you have a bottleneck somewhere in your system's setup.