FOXIT vs. Adobe PDF IFilter [ 32-bit only ]

Sometimes back I had the chance to run a performance and international sufficiency analysis on the Adobe and FOXIT ifilters for some of our customers. The following report is now made available for a broader audience.

 

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF 32-BIT FOXIT PDF IFILTER vs. ADOBE PDF IFILTER

Machine : Intel Xeon CPU @ 1.4 GHz (4 hyperthreaded processors)

            4.00 GB of RAM

            32-bit Win2K3 SP1

            Indexer performance set to partly reduced.

FOXIT v1.0

ADOBE v.8

Total # of pdf documents

10917

10917

# successful crawls

10871

10909

# errors

44 (expired ebooks etc)

0

# warnings

2 (corrupted doc)

2 (corrupted doc)

CRAWL TIME:

        Portal Content

00:49:21.163

03:34:39.237

        Anchor Crawl 1

00:02:03.527

00:02:39.073

        Anchor Crawl 2

00:00:02.173

00:00:02.437

       TOTAL Crawl Time

00:51:26.863 (~ 51 minutes)

03:38:00.747 (~ 218 minutes)

                       

Analysis:

1. The FOXIT filter is 4.27 times faster than the Adobe filter on a quad proc machine. This is expected since the adobe filter is not truly multithreaded and serialized the threads.

2. The Adobe filter crawls some documents which ideally should not be crawled (expired ebooks etc).

INTL SUFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF 32-BIT FOXIT PDF IFILTER vs. ADOBE PDF IFILTER

Both the adobe and FOXIT filters do not return the correct locale for non-english documents. Both of them always emits LOCALE = 1033 (en-us).Hence we pass them to the neutral wordbreaker and this compromises search relevance.

Tests were performed on JPN, CHS, FRE and HEB pdf documents using both the indexer and standalone test tools.

Language

# Tokens

MOSS returns result with FOXIT ?

MOSS returns result with Adobe?

Correct locale emitted by FOXIT?

Correct locale emitted by Adobe?

JPN

2

No

No

No

No

CHS

2

No

No

No

No

FRE

2

Yes

Yes

No

No

HEB

2

Yes

Yes

No

No

Note that since French is syntactically very close to English, we still get back valid results. In case of the Hebrew documents, I’d say it’s a matter of coincidence that the token the language expert gave me was correctly wordbroken.