I have a Wiki wich contains a lot of pages wich list a larger amount of uploaded pdf-files (by semantic mediawiki). I tried to activate Extension:PDFHandler but it acquired so much system resource when calling that pages that errors come up. I think thats some timeout and the initial rendering is very slow. There is no problem with pages that contain only some pdf-files and / or even smaller ones. I'm not very interrested in having thumbnails for each pdf on everywhere but I like the preview on the File:-pages. Is it somehow possible to control where pdf-handler should render the pdf-s and where not. Maybe a magicword like __nopdfhandler__ on the pages which contain larger number of links to pdf files or the like would help. One could include this to templates.
Topic on Project:Support desk
What is the exact error that comes up? That should be the first thing to investigate, not necessarily some ideas for random workarounds...
The message is
"This page is experiencing technical difficulties. "
You get a completely blank page and the only single thing that is displayed literally says "This page is experiencing technical difficulties" in English, and nothing else at all? I'm asking as I can imagine that's not an error created by MediaWiki.
In Extension:PdfHandler there's a configuration variable called $wgPdfCreateThumbnailsInJobQueue. Have you tried that? It should queue the thumbnails so they're rendered one at a time. This should mitigate the issue when a page contains lots of embedded PDFs and all need to be rendered, speeding the load, but the thumbnails in this case may be delayed (not all PDFs would have thumbnails).
I doublechecked what happens when I turn pdfHandler on. On pages that contain a larger amount of links to uploaded pdf-files (by semantic mediawiki #ask) -> It take about 2 minutes with a white screen and the the following message appears (on the white screen)
"An internal server error occurred. Please try again later."
I found out that some of the pdf that have to be rendered cause errors. I checked this by calling the file:-pages one by one. One error is
"An internal server error occurred. Please try again later."
as above.
Another errror is the File:-Page loads but there is something like
"Fehler beim Erstellen des Vorschaubildes: convert: unable to acquire cache view `File too large' @ fatal/cache-view.c/AcquireAuthenticCacheView/121."
instead of the thumbnail.
Yes I think that message is not generated by mediawiki but at least it is related to pdfHandler (and it's environment), cause there are no problems when turning it of.
I tried $wgPdfCreateThumbnailsInJobQueue = true and = false but I can't see any difference .