Adobe Acrobat Reader on Win10 leaks memory like a sieve!

[Bassman59]

What in blazes is going on with Acrobat Reader?

Open it in Win10. It starts two AcroRd32.exe processes. Each takes about 55 MB memory with no open files.

I open a 10 MB data sheet. Memory on one of the process zooms up to about 250 MB straight away. I scroll through the file a bit to make sure that it's all loaded, and memory use creeps up to about 450 MB.

Look away for a couple of minutes and now memory use is up to 2.6 GB.

Sheesh, this is crap.

[SilverSolder]

Acrobat Reader was good up till about version 5...   then it became a bloated piece of crap.

Foxit Reader is a decent alternative...

[rsjsouza]

I have Acrobat Reader instslled in one of the machines but only for the offending document that does not render well on alternative software.

Foxit 9.3 is very good. It has the print-to-PDF driver that works very well. I vaguely recall that newer versions removed that and got sensibly more bloated.

If you are like me and has to consult just a bit of information or two in several different datasheets or technical manuals, then SumatraPDF is as fast as it can get.

[Bassman59]

I did not know about Foxit ... I'll install it when I get back to the office on Tuesday.

Why can't they just ship Apple Preview on Windows.

[rdl]

Another good pdf viewer is SumatraPDF. Open source and supports many different document types. It is designed as a portable application. Just download and unzip its files into a folder and it's good to go. I've been using it for many years now. One limitation though is that it doesn't do fill-in forms. I use Foxit for the rare occasions I need that ability (usually just tax time).

[gmb42]

Another +1 for SumatraPDF.  Not only is it good at its task, it eliminates the need for the bugfest that is Acrobat.

[Whales]

Sumatra uses the mupdf backend, it seems to be very fast and reliable. 

There is both a "Traditional installer" and a zip-file ("portable") version available to download, pick your poison.

I still have to keep Adobe Acrobat installed on work computers, however, because of various proprietary (or "proprietary in practice") PDF extensions such as dynamic forms.  There are Aus gov documents that use javascript in the PDF to modify the form as you fill it out :/  only adobe is insane enough to implement that.

[Bassman59]

Sumatra uses the mupdf backend, it seems to be very fast and reliable. 

There is both a "Traditional installer" and a zip-file ("portable") version available to download, pick your poison.

I still have to keep Adobe Acrobat installed on work computers, however, because of various proprietary (or "proprietary in practice") PDF extensions such as dynamic forms.  There are Aus gov documents that use javascript in the PDF to modify the form as you fill it out :/  only adobe is insane enough to implement that.

On my Macs I just use Preview, but last year I started using the US IRS "Free Fillable Forms" to do my Federal tax return and that required Acrobat. So Acrobat was on that one machine just long enough to do my taxes and then I got rid of it.

[newbrain]

[ Dons fireproof vest ]
Apart from some recalcitrant document or forms, I haven't used a "reader" in years.

90% of my PDF reading is done inside a browser.
I mostly use Firefox (associated to PDF documents), but Edge is also functional enough for my purposes.
There's also a VS Code extension, based on the same code, albeit a tad slow, especially with big docs.

They have in common one feature that I could not find in either Adobe Reader or Foxit: Incremental Search.
They also have in common not having a metric crapton of useless stuff.

[SiliconWizard]

I use Foxit on Android, and PDF XChange on Windows. Currently have 17 PDF files open in PDF XChange, and memory use tops at ~280MB after days of use without quitting the app. Has annotation, signing, bookmarks...

[radar_macgyver]

90% of my PDF reading is done inside a browser.
I mostly use Firefox (associated to PDF documents)

Same here, though I found that most of the times that Firefox's memory usage goes through the roof, it's because of an open PDF file. This is true on both my Win7 work PC, and my Fedora 34 home PC.

I will give Sumatra PDF a try, thanks for the tip!

[Bassman59]

90% of my PDF reading is done inside a browser.
I mostly use Firefox (associated to PDF documents)

Same here, though I found that most of the times that Firefox's memory usage goes through the roof, it's because of an open PDF file. This is true on both my Win7 work PC, and my Fedora 34 home PC.

I will give Sumatra PDF a try, thanks for the tip!

Yeah, Firefox seems like a memory leaker too.

-----

I just installed SumatraPDF and with that 10.4 MB data sheet I mentioned upthread and a TI ARM data sheet open in it, it's using only 70.6 MB and that memory use isn't increasing (as one would expect).

It renders fast and looks good.

Thanks for the recommendation!

[Karel]

I use Okular:  https://okular.kde.org/
It's the only pdf viewer I use.

[bson]

SumatraPDF looks great.

And, I realized I know the author!  We worked together some 15 years ago, on the same dev team.  Nice guy and a really good programmer!

[BrianHG]

After un-installing everything Adobe, and going with SumatraPDF, just the windows 7 explorer desktop on my laptop runs twice as fast, never mind the reading of .pdfs.

[BrianHG]

Warning to those who use FireFox to search for strings/text in .pdfs.

Randomly, Firefox will get stuck only searching for your string in the Table of Contents only and ignore the rest of the main text.  Then other times you open the same document, it will work.

After working on my DDR3 ram controller months back, searching for many of the timing errors and references, Firefox randomly would not find the 't??' strings I was looking for even though I knew the text was full of them.  At the time, I had no choice but to install Adobe.  Firefox screwed me hours to a few days of work on more than 1 occasion...

The only gripe I have with Sumatra is the lack of print options like 'Print Current View' which I normally use to make a Zoom print of a specific sections of PCB silkscreen or schematic changes.   And, it is missing a feature to select between printing on both sides of a page which I use for printing data sheets, or, print single sided pages for when I schematics or spread sheets where I want to lay out the pages on a table.

[SiliconWizard]

I really suggest trying PDF XChange. Been using it for years. It can absolutely print the current view, and supports a lot like annotation, bookmarking, signing, filling PDF forms, and so on. I've found it better than all alternatives I've tried, at least on Windows.

The viewer I still use on Win 7 is this one: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
It's been discontinued, but works plenty fine.
A newer version is this: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor - as a viewer, it's also free.

[james_s]

Adobe software has been generally crap for many years. I've been using Sumatra for PDF files and it works really well. I hate viewing them in a browser, I don't remember what issue I was having with that but once I found Sumatra I never looked back.

[NiHaoMike]

Adobe software has been generally crap for many years.

Their PDF viewer has been junk as far as I can remember, as far back as the late 90s. I remember how their IE integration would be really slow when loading, although to be fair most likely Microsoft is also partly to blame for that.

[gmb42]

The only gripe I have with Sumatra is the lack of print options like 'Print Current View' which I normally use to make a Zoom print of a specific sections of PCB silkscreen or schematic changes.   And, it is missing a feature to select between printing on both sides of a page which I use for printing data sheets, or, print single sided pages for when I schematics or spread sheets where I want to lay out the pages on a table.

On Windows single\double sided is a printer preference, can't help with printing in zoomed view although there are some Sumatra advanced options to control size to fit the paper size which probably don't help.

[Gyro]

Adobe software has been generally crap for many years. I've been using Sumatra for PDF files and it works really well. I hate viewing them in a browser, I don't remember what issue I was having with that but once I found Sumatra I never looked back.

The nice thing about Sumatra is that you don't have to worry about falling prey to dodgy embedded Javascript in PDFs from the web. It has no Javascript support. I just have it set as my default handler in Firefox.

The ability to have it open the current PDF in another reader without having to save it first and exit on ESC key are also handy timesavers. It's just built for speed and simplicity.

More fancy features aren't always better, especially when Adobe are involved!

[rsjsouza]

The only gripe I have with Sumatra is the lack of print options like 'Print Current View' which I normally use to make a Zoom print of a specific sections of PCB silkscreen or schematic changes.   And, it is missing a feature to select between printing on both sides of a page which I use for printing data sheets, or, print single sided pages for when I schematics or spread sheets where I want to lay out the pages on a table.

I have the same need and I either zoom in the PDF reader and capture the region of interest using another tool (Screenpresso is a favourite of mine) or I open the file on Foxit Reader (as I mentioend above, I tend to use an older version to avoid any bloatware). The Foxit also allows me to do multipage printing, where large schematics can be spread around multiple pages.

[jh15]

I stopped recommending Foxit years ago because of claims it was full of spyware. Is it cleaned up?

[capt bullshot]

I really suggest trying PDF XChange. Been using it for years. It can absolutely print the current view, and supports a lot like annotation, bookmarking, signing, filling PDF forms, and so on. I've found it better than all alternatives I've tried, at least on Windows.

+1 for PDF XChange, @work I'm forced to use Windows, so I've installed this one, an older Version: 2.5. Works nicely.

[rsjsouza]

I stopped recommending Foxit years ago because of claims it was full of spyware. Is it cleaned up?

I don't recall any spyware, but like everything today you need to always pay attention to all the details during install.

I mentioned above that I don't use the latest version due to add-ons and removal of features that were important to me. I use version 9.7.2, which can be found also at a few third party websites such as:
https://foxit-reader.en.uptodown.com/windows/versions

If you go far back, you can find versions that support 98. Another website has these versions:
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/foxit-pdf-reader/