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.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Sometimes back I had the chance to run a performance and international sufficiency analysis on the Adobe

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Sometimes back I had the chance to run a performance and international sufficiency analysis on the Adobe

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2007
  Deb, regarding your comments about the returned locale information: Do the indexed PDF documents actually contain locale information? As far as I know only "Tagged PDF" documents can optionally contain locale information, and those are fairly rare. Regards Stephan

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2007
  Stephan, thanks for bringing up the point.I was not aware only Tagged pdf docs contain locale info. A lot of our customers (especially ones in east asia) complained about poor relevance in search results on localized pdf docs.The reason is since we always get back an english locale all the time, the proper WordBreaker and stemmer is never invoked.As Stephan mentioned above, tagging the pdf documents with correct locale might give better relevance. Any thoughts ? :) regards, Deb.

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2007
  Adobe ha finalmente rilasciato la versione a 64 bit dell'IFilter per indicizzare i documenti PDF

• Anonymous
  November 30, 2007
  Filter pack - when will it be available?  We are now in December and there was an announcement elsewhere that it would be available in July and an announcement here that it would be available in August. If it was released can you tell us where to find it, and if it was not released can you tell us whether it ever will be?

• Anonymous
  January 21, 2008
  it's weird. i can index and search non-english documents with Foxit ifilter. hmmmm.

• Anonymous
  January 21, 2008
  Foxit PDF iFilter Support Chinese/Japanese/Korean PDF documents

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2008
  I often work with customers who are running the 64 bit version of MOSS, and they always want to know

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2008
  I think one of the most common tasks any new born MOSS environment gets as a christening, is a installation

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2008
  After so long a time Adobe finally released its 64bit version of PDF iFilter! http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2008
  Adobe has finally released their free 64-bit PDF iFilter for MOSS. If you do not know what this is for;

• Anonymous
  December 10, 2008
  Adobe has FINALLY released a 64 bit PDF iFilter. For everyone out there running 64 bit MOSS, without

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2008
  PDF iFilter Battle FoxIT v.s. Adobe iFilter 9

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
  Somehow I missed this news late last year. Adobe has finally released a 64bit version of it’s PDF iFilter

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2009
  Windows Share Point 3.0 e IFilter per PDF