Exporting Space as PDF Stalls at 50%

[Anna McDonald]

When I try to export a space to PDF, the process stalls at 50%. Has anybody else experienced this issue and fixed it? If so, what was your solution?

[Olli Nevalainen · Accepted solution]

Hi Anna,

I think you might be hitting a known performance problem with the PDF export.

There are a couple of options to improve the situation:

1. Upgrade Confluence to 5.1.2 or later (major performance improvement)
2. Increase heap size
3. Export only a subset of the pages in space instead of exporting the whole space

I hope this helps

[Anna McDonald]

We'll try these options. Thanks for the help!

Hopefully, this is an issue that can be fully resolved in the future.

[Anna McDonald]

UPDATE: The upgrade to v5.3 aided in speeding up the conversion process, which still breaks. However, I found out it is breaking due to some formatting issues in addition to the size of the space (400+ pages), because it works in smaller chunks. Still, it works faster now and it does output PDF files. I am happy to say that I was able to identify the formatting issue and should have full space PDFs output soon. Thanks again for the help!

[Deleted user]

Hi Anna, could you pls leave a hint regarding the formatting issue? I think we might have a similar problem. Thank You! :-) Pit

[Anna McDonald]

Too many indentations. I have to go back through the docs and reformat. I had copied and pasted whole sections from our online source and it copied in metadata that added numerous indentations. I will be revisiting that document this month, and if I think of it I will comment here about whether it is fixed.

[Deleted user]

Many THX for your quick answer - your help is very much appreciated. :-) For some strange reason today my export was successful after 3 hours (pdf size: 526 MB for 2539 pages)...without any heap size changes. We will test Olli's heap size solution anyway to test performance. (Confluence 5.1.3)

[Anna McDonald]

Wow! That's a long time!

[Peter Kahn]

@Pit Fischer  Know it's been a long time, but did the export hang at 50% for most of those three hours?  I'm trying to figure out if I should give up and plan a restart or not.  I've been at 50% and on page 1 for over an hour.  I've 16G on the heap with 33% free running confluence 5.8.6.  My guess is that some temp file blocks successful export.  I'm waiting to hear back from Atlassian support before scheduling a restart.

[Anna McDonald]

Related image of what I am seeing: