PSPDFKit Server Requirements

Information

PSPDFKit Server has been deprecated and replaced by Document Engine. To start using Document Engine, refer to the migration guide. With Document Engine, you’ll have access to robust new capabilities (read the blog for more information).

Information

PSPDFKit for Web Server-Backed mode for SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive, and Salesforce is currently in development. To get an email when we launch this feature, or to learn more, please get in touch.

PSPDFKit Server is delivered as a Docker container that you deploy to your own infrastructure. It then requires a PostgreSQL database and dedicated file storage, the latter of which can be either the PostgreSQL database itself, or any S3-compatible object storage.

The minimum requirements for PSPDFKit Server are:

The following cloud database services are also supported:

Server Resource Requirements

PSPDFKit Server requires a certain amount of compute and memory resources to serve and process documents. However, the amount of resources used depends on many factors, including, but not limited to, the number of uploads, views, and editing users.

PSPDFKit Server was built to run on both x86_64- and ARM64-based processors. We recommend using ARM-based hardware, since in many cases, this offers almost identical performance to x86_64 at a lower price.

In general, PSPDFKit Server relies more heavily on CPU than on memory. The Docker container is likely to use RAM in the range of the lower hundreds of megabytes as a baseline.

CPU-intensive operations include rendering and preprocessing PDFs, and the output of these activities is cached either in memory or in Redis (if enabled). So depending on the distribution of files that are “hot,” this will change and might increase your requirements.

A good starting point is a server with 2–4 CPU cores and 4–8 GB of memory (e.g. a c6g.large or c6g.xlarge instance if you’re deploying on AWS).

ℹ️ Note: We don’t recommend using burstable instances: PDF rendering is CPU intensive, and burstable instances would quickly run out of CPU credits, making it more difficult to maintain acceptable performance.

When PSPDFKit Server saturates one of these resources and performance becomes unsatisfying, you can switch to a more powerful instance. To achieve better observability of your nodes, we recommend setting up metrics.