In PR 11912 we started caching images that occur on multiple pages globally, which improved performance a lot in many PDF documents.
However, one slightly annoying limitation of the implementation is the need to re-parse the image once the global-caching threshold has been reached. Previously this was difficult to avoid, since large image-resources will cause cleanup to run on the main-thread after rendering has finished. In PR 16108 we started delaying this cleanup a little bit, to improve performance if a user e.g. zooms and/or rotates the document immediately after rendering completes.
Taking those two PRs together, we now have a situation where it's much more likely that the main-thread has "globally used" images cached at the page-level. Hence we can instead attempt to *copy* a locally cached image into the global object-cache on the main-thread and thus reduce unnecessary re-parsing of large/complex global images, which significantly reduces the rendering time in many cases.
For the PDF document in issue 11878, the rendering time of *the second page* changes as follows (on my computer):
- With the `master`-branch it takes >600 ms to render.
- With this patch that goes down to ~50 ms, which is one order of magnitude faster.
(Note that all other pages are, as expected, completely unaffected by these changes.)
This new main-thread copying is limited to "large" global images, since:
- Re-parsing of small images, on the worker-thread, is usually fast enough to not be an issue.
- With the delayed cleanup after rendering, it's still not guaranteed that an image is available in a page-level cache on the main-thread.
- This forces the worker-thread to wait for the main-thread, which is a pattern that you always want to avoid unless absolutely necessary.