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Comment by plopz | Hacker News Reader

The problem with chrome is the performance, it is very slow and uses a bunch of memory. There was a neat post here awhile ago about generating pdfs faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39379690

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Indeed, speed is an issue (and it's hard to tackle). Additionally, when using Chrome, what you see is not always what you get. The layout often doesn't match expectations, especially with complex elements. It's ok for simple use cases, but for professional and scalable solutions, you usually need to switch to something else!!

Yes, that's a hard issue for arbitrary/user-provided HTML pages. But with templates under your control, the context is different. Your designers do not have to trust Chrome; they can preview, tweak using print media queries, and provide robust templates that print to acceptable PDF.

The speed issue is also real, but you can scale horizontally by spawning other chromium instances (with gotenberg containers for ex). Not really efficient but it can certainly help alleviate most of the load...

Absolutely! It's all about finding the right balance between granting users complete control over the layout and restricting it to ensure specific use cases through templates. As for scaling, indeed, horizontal scaling is an option, but there's a limit to its practicality. It would be interesting to conduct a resource/time analysis over the various solutions available on the market in different situations/use cases

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