DOMPDF Eating up CPU

[Hershel]

On a Drupal 6 site that was just upgraded to CiviCRM 3.4, when someone registers for an event, the process eventually dies on a 500 error. We investigated it, and identified that the problematic module is DOMPDF. It appears to hang without being able to complete successfully.

There is an xdebug.txt file here civihosting.com/sites/default/files/xdebug.txt.zip if anyone wants to have a look at it.

[Donald Lobo]

This has come up a few times and would be great if someone can help provide a patch to make the PDF generation and receipt attachment optional. it should not be too hard to do so (maybe a 4-8 hour project)

sorry, i dont think any of us know a lot about DOMPDF to help in that. the dompdf forums might be a better place

lobo

[Eileen]

Hershel, I dug into this a bit (before giving up once) but got the impression that your html matters a lot to dompdf - I think that it has to calculate column width on the tables & loads up all the pdf data before it can start on that.

[Eileen]

nb - same template - different civi version stopped it working?

[Hershel]

nb - same template - different civi version stopped it working?

Correct. I think they were using registrations in the previous version. I'm pretty sure.

[xavier]

Might be worthwhile asking in dompdf forums/mailing list. Presumably they know the best practice and what to do/not to do to avoid using too much memory?

X+

[Hershel]

I posted an issue there.

[FatherShawn]

I'm really intrigued by the potential of this new Drupal PDF module, epspecially the savings of  not rendering much of the page on each receipt due through template merging:  http://drupal.org/project/views_pdf

[Hershel]

They posted a response at http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/issues/detail?id=277 :

Would you be able to update to the latest 0.6.0 beta? Lots of changes have been made since the Helmut release.

If you can post a sample of the HTML being rendered that would help determining what's going on. Just FYI, the most typical cause of 500 errors on simple documents is a table cell larger than a single page.

We'll take a look at the xdebug.txt when we get a chance to see if there's anything of note.

[Donald Lobo]

hershel:

can u do a local upgrade to 0.6.beta on your civicrm packages directory and see how it goes

lobo

[Hershel]

Tried that but unfortunately didn't solve the problem.

[Donald Lobo]

any interest from anyone to submit a patch that makes the PDF attachment optional for event reg / contributions. To begin with it could just be a global configuration option that is enabled by default, but can be turned off.

At a later stage, would be nice to make it a setting for all "public" pages that send an email. But that will require a DB change and is a wee bit more complex

We can help u'll out with this patch on IRC. A great easy project to get started with

lobo

[Hershel]

The dompdf guy said

DOMPDF 0.6.0 will return the working HTML document as a string if you call $dompdf->output_html().

Can you tell me whereabouts I could do that and I will try ? Perhaps that could help point us in the direction, in the meantime.

[Donald Lobo]

CRM/Core/BAO/MessageTemplates.php, function sendTemplate

search for PDFFileName

Seems like sending a PDF receipt might be more easily encapsulated as a column in the message template table

You can add a config variable in the Admin screens, maybe under:

CRM/Admin/Form/Setting/Miscellaneous.php. But maybe fixing message templates schema might be a better thing to do

lobo

[majortom]

Hershel -
   Have you figured out any work around? Does upgrading to drupal 7/CiviCRM 4 fix the problem?