Viewing large PDF files on the web

[Support]

Q:

I'm interested in your PDF viewer for ASP.net. I need to display large PDF files (300 MB - 4 GB) in the browser, and the application has to be fast.

I don't want to make the client browser wait to download the large file. Also, there may be hundreds of users viewing hundreds of different files, so the server can't load the data into memory all at once either.  Does PDFTron WebViewer buffer on both client and server side?

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A:

WebViewer Publisher can deal with huge and complicated PDF files. The optimized files can be instantly viewed in any browser (without need to download the entire document).

Once the file is web optimized (i.e. converted to XOD) it can be accessed by any number of users. You can simply store optimized files in S3, GDrive, Azure Storage, or your own servers. When viewing files your compute servers do not need to do any number crunching. So it is very scalable...  your solution is only limited with network bandwidth.

You can convert files ahead of time to a XOD file or perform 'on the fly' conversion. For more info see: http://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/getstarted.html.

We highly recommend converting your files to XOD ahead of time, especially with files of that size, and the getting started page talks about the different ways to convert them. 

So once you have all your files converted to XOD then when WebViewer requests to view a document it will send HTTP range requests for only the necessary parts of the file. So you can jump to different parts of file right away and only the necessary information is downloaded. There is caching built into the viewer to improve performance as well as prerendering to improve the user experience. This also means all your server is doing is hosting these documents so it won't have to store the data in memory.