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#1151 Very Slow (seconds to over a minute) to display page content
In the last one or two releases of Skim, it has been extremely slow to load PDF pages. The loading time seems somewhat proportional to the length of the document. This happens reliably, alas.
Once the doc is loaded, processing is fast.
I'm on macOS 10.2.2 with ample (16GB) RAM and a SSD. Might the problem be related to macOS? PDFPenPro and Preview are working fine with the same documents.
(I'm a very heavy Skim user and have been for years.)
Loading and sisplayling of the PDF is done by Apple's PDFKit. We cannot do much about this. YThis may be because in the last release we have allowed background drawing (or whatever it does). That is necessary for 10.12, otherwise the PDF becomes very slow in scrolling, so we cannot bring this back.
Think response does not fully address the important issue I raised because Apple's Preview.app presumably uses Apple's PDFKit. Preview loads as fast as ever (now orders of magnitude faster than Skim), and scrolls fast too.
Are other users seeing this issue? Or maybe there's some background knowledge I'm missing here.
Hopefully this issue is not wide spread. I'm nearly finished a book that explains in detail how to use Skim.app systematically for enhanced cognitive productivity. I'll do some tests next week.
Last edit: lpb2ha 2017-01-18
The point is that Apple's PDFKit is the one that loads and displays the PDF, this is not under our control, and I dopn't know and can't know what influences it, because Apple tells us exactly nothing about this. so I don't know how and cannot know how to work around this issue.
Many thanks for your responses, Chritiaan. It sounds like a bug needs to be filed with Appple. I don't have the technical knowledge to file a sufficiently meaningful but on this issue; but I might be able to find someone who can do that after I investigate some more. (I once led a project at SFU that looked at extending Skim to study self-regulated learning.)
Last edit: lpb2ha 2017-01-19
macOS software update 10.12.3 seems to have fixed this problem. Loading times super fast again. What a relief!
That's great to hear. It looks much better for me too.
Per our email exchange, the problem returned and seems to be due to macOS. The problem seems to occur only for annotated PDFs (annotation being why we use Skim.app). And it seems to be more likely to happen when there are many PDFS open. (Yet I am using the top end 2017 13" MacBook Pro with16GB RAM.) It can take Skim more than a minute to render some PDFs. Skim can also render pages incompletely.
I've found a workaround, however: Rotating the document in Skim using ⌘R ⌘L causes Skim to render the document correctly.
Last edit: lpb2ha 2017-08-14