The 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open. Your response will help shape the future of the Drupal business ecosystem.Views PDF takes an extremely long time to compile its output when field collections and other content in complex reports are involved. When a PAGE is added to the view there does not seem to be a noticeable delay in the preview and therefore it is taking a long time in the generation of the pdf, not querying the structure of the relationships or pulling data from the related field collection views. Once a pdf has been generated for the first time, it is much faster, presumably due to some caching even though caching has not been explicitly enabled on the view. Try it out for yourself here:
www.nicwiltshire.com/drupal7
Log in as:
demo
demo
Go to nicwiltshire.com/drupal7/node/118
Click on the pdf generator popup on the left sidebar.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| slow pdf export details.txt | 97.16 KB | cedartowerservices |
Comments
Comment #1
cedartowerservices commentedI'm posting this comment in reference to the slow pdf generation as I think I have solved the issue. I was using PNG files in certain fields (user signatures) and once I switched to jpg the pdfs generated very quickly. It seems there are some inherent incompatibilities with views pdf and png - and additional settings on your web server affect how this plays out. I migrated to a dedicated server after this problem and my pdfs crashed completely - on the previous server they worked, albeit slowly. Once jpgs were used the whole problem disappeared.
Comment #2
simon georges commented