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by rajh 814 days ago
I needed to transform a 12MB HTML file into a PDF document and headless Chrome quickly ran out of memory (4GB+).

We are now using a commercial alternative that seems be be using a custom engine that implements the HTML and CSS specs. The result is reduced memory usage (below 512MB during my tests) and the resulting PDF is much smaller, 3.3MB vs 42MB.
2 comments
nojvek 813 days ago
We use docraptor based on princexml engine but haven’t tried a huge pdf. We generate 20-30 page pdfs sometime and it works great.
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rajh 813 days ago
We are also using DocRaptor. It takes around 20 seconds to generate the PDF, and we only need to generate it every night. So the costs are also not an issue at the moment.
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phonon 814 days ago
Did you try Weasyprint?
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rajh 813 days ago
Yes, I’ve tried all the open source projects I could find. Including Weasyprint and wkhtmltopdf. Weasyprint was much slower than headless Chrome and also required a lot of memory to process the HTML. And wkhtmltopdf is no longer maintained and crashed while processing.
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