I, Librarian benchmarking - how fast can a web-based PDF manager be?
Some of you may say that a web-based PDF manager is not very good idea. After all, most web-based services you know, like Yahoo or Google web mail, are not very snappy. Let me demonstrate how fast I, Librarian can be.
I, Librarian is different, because you have server on your own desktop or an intranet computer. Therefore, there is no significant lag time. Let's look at a direct comparison with the leading reference manager for a mere US$300.00 on a mid level Windows desktop computer.
As you can see, I, Librarian is actually faster than the commercial desktop application. *The comparison of the cold and warm startup time involves the necessary sign-in in case of I, Librarian. Also, I, Librarian "lives" in a web browser of your choice. Different web browsers have different startup times. In this case, I used Firefox 2.0.
Next, let's have a look at how fast a search for a record can take. The following graph shows an average search time for a specific word in all metadata.
Most of us will probably amass up to a 10,000 articles during our career. The average search times for this number of records is 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. For those of you who collected tens of thousands of records, the search time will climb into 0.5 to 1.5 seconds on a mid level desktop computer.
I also tested I, Librarian on a modest notebook with a 0.5 MB of rather slow memory. There were obvious slowdowns, but to my surprise my work progressed without too much waiting. The biggest slugs were actually the PDF plugins from Adobe and Foxit. But once they loaded into memory, everything went quite fast.
In my opinion, these benchmarks demonstrate that a web-based PDF manager can be fast enough for a comfortable work. If you want to try yourself, here is the download page.
Comments
- Jorge on September 11, 2009, at 06:29 AM
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This work by Martin Kucej is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.