The PDF From Hell!!

We've all had those days. We've all reached that point. Something is broken.

Everyone, their brother, and some dude name Cletis is on a conference call. It's chaos. Citrix is Down! People are eating each other alive and flinging small children out of windows. And one more MBA-sucking assclown manager wanting a status decides to ask you for an update on the crisis de jour .

"Well Frank, It's just about the same as it was 2 minutes ago the last time you asked me."

But this time the blackberry toting walrus has done it. That's it. You can't take it anymore. It's done. You f-ing quit!

.....

But wouldn't it be icing on the cake if you could really show them all just how far down the crapper they're going to be without your able hands on deck? Of course, I'm not talking about corporate espionage or anything of the sort, rather just illustrating the cumulative impact of very inefficient computing.

Enter the PDF from Hell.

Consider the following stats: (from loginconsultants.com)

• Memory a couple of seconds after opening the doc: 80MB
• Memory after browsing extensively: 150MB
• Memory after printing : 216 MB
• CPU 100% for a couple of seconds while browsing to the next page.
• Starting a Printjob: 100% CPU for about 2 minutes
• Printjob spoolfile size: a whopping 741MB!

Chances are that if your company is using thin computing one of the apps they're delivering is email. Get it? Imagine sending this little puppy to several thousand email users at once. If you figure about oh I dunno ~50 or so users per server the impact is immediate and ugly. In other words..tell those servers to bend over and kiss their dual core asses goodbye.

Of course, this type of thing is very useful when load testing and capacity planning too.

Play nice kiddies.

-CG