Testing Adobe Acrobat and Distiller speeds running under virtualization with VMware and Parallels.

Adobe Acrobat CS3 running under Parallels and VMware

How fast will Adobe Acrobat perform when running in WIndows emulation under Parallels or VMware Fusion on Mac OS X?

To test this out, we performed some tests of common tasks under both VMware and Parallels.

Acrobat possesses many more features these days than it used to. But its main use in the graphic arts industry is to convert documents for use in print and pre-press.

With this in mind, our tests focused on simulating some real world tasks that graphic designers or reproduction departments might perform with Acrobat. As with the Photoshop speed tests and InDesign performance tests, we started off with looking at the speed of launching the application.

Most people outside of the graphics industry will not even have heard of Acrobat Distiller, but for many designers it is the only reliable method of creating a print-ready PDF document. As such we tested distilling a PostScript file using the default Acrobat Distiller prepress settings. We then tested the speed of Distiller when creating a web targeted PDF file using Distiller's default smallest file setting. Finally we used Acrobat's PDF Optimizer tool to reduce the file size.

Adobe Acrobat speed test results

	VMware	Parallels	OS X
Launch Test	4.56	3.77	1.46
Distiller Press Quality settings	18	21	14
Distiller Smallest File settings	19	12	10
Adobe Acrobat PDF Optimizer Test	3.23	3.59	4.43
All times are in seconds

Acrobat launch test

Adobe Distiller PostScript file using Acrobat press quality settings

Acrobat Distiller PostScript file using prepress settings

Acrobat Distiller PostScript file using smallest file settings

PDF optimizer speed test

Shorter bars are better.

It should be noted that the Distiller test results varied each time they were performed and so we have gone with the fastest result of 5 tests. The overall time differences were consistent, however, with VMware winning all the Press Quality tests and Parallels being consistently fastest when distilling using the Smallest File settings.

Some conclusions

A varied collection of test results and perhaps an indicator that Acrobat is less reliant on high powered computers than some other graphics applications. There is no clear cut winner here and certainly more testing would need to be done with regards to different Distiller settings, before concluding which virtualization software is the fastest when using Adobe Acrobat.