Evince 3.18.2 claims excessive memeoy when opening a multipage file created with AbbyyFineReader14 (AFR14, runs on Windows10)

[melolontha]

If Evince 3.18.2 (running on Xubuntu 16.04.4) loads such a pdf file (e.g. after doubleclicking on the file name in Thunar), a few seconds later more than 3 GiB of RAM are in use. Then memory consumption stays almost stationary for some time to sharply rise again.
Finally you may be caught in swapping memory and becoime almost unable to control the computer, because the cursor reacts on mouse movements only with much time delay.
In some cases, after many minutes of heavy CPU use, finally a result is shown. Memory consumption may be up to 6GiB for a two page grayscale pdf document and even for a two page BW-document! In such a case, after stopping Evince, all the memory is back again and the computer is operational as it was before.
The same documents load quickly in Firefox 59.0.2 (64-Bit) and without excessive memory consumption.
The syndrome does not show up, if Evince shall read a single page pdf document. But even if you add the same content into a single document (in AFR14) to make it a two page document, the result shows the syndrome.
The syndrome does not show up with files made by AFR9.
GIMP2.8 and LibreOffice (Draw) Build-ID: 1:5.1.6~rc2-0ubuntu1~xenial3 also suffer from the same illness for the same file. Do they all rely on the same libraries?
If someone needs sample files to look into it, I can provide some.
It even looks like Evince claims this excessive memory already when it is started from a command line and shows the “last opened“ view. The included example Test AFR14_2 Seiten, beruht auf Test-AFR14_00-00_SW.tif_SW.pdf was created with AFR14 (under Windows) by including the scanned image Test-AFR14_00-00_SW.tif twice into the PDF file sauch that it becomes a more than one page pdf file. After I opened Evince, it claimed 3.3GiB and just showed the names of the last opened files with some default icons. After waiting some minutes, the icons were filled with previews and then Evince‘s memory consumption dropped down to 48,9 MB!
There were known errors which may or may not have the same root cause: in Evince 0.6x, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431423 and in Evince 2.6x, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=577144.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: evince 3.18.2-1ubuntu4.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-122.146-generic 4.4.117
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-122-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.16
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Thu May 3 15:15:30 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-02-10 (81 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 16.04.1 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160719)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=de_DE
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[melolontha (073284806-t-online)]

The same memory-wasteful and cpu stressing behavior also shows up in GIMP and in Xpdf. It might be a bug in Poppler, the underlying pdf representation library, I suspect. According to Poppler's site, Evince, Gimp and Xpdf all rely on poppler.

[Adalbert Hanßen (melolontha)]

According to the people from Abbyy Fine Reader the error is caused by a "linearisation problem" in AFR14 and it will be fixed there.

However for files which show the syndrome I found out that they comply to the norm according to VeraPdf.

According to the people of Abbyy Fine Reader, the error does no longer show up for Poppler Version > 0.50. However I was unable to check this with Evince since I have no version of Evince at hand which incorporates a version of Poppler>0.50. I only found that pdftotext version 0.66.0 did not use excessive memory nor excessive usage of CPU.

Unfortunately I can not switch back to Poppler version 0.41.0 which belongs to Xubuntu 16.04.4.

It would be helpful if one could lift all Poppler-dependant programs to a version > 0.50 without changing the version of the operating system.