Transitioning from PSPDFKit Server to Document Engine

PSPDFKit Server has been deprecated and replaced by Document Engine. To migrate to Document Engine and unlock advanced document processing capabilities, refer to our migration guide. Learn more about these enhancements on our blog.

Using Nutrient Web SDK with Document Engine for SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive, and Salesforce integrations is currently under development. Get in touch to stay updated on these releases.

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:

• PostgreSQL 12, 13, 14, or 15

• Docker 1.10.0 or newer

The following cloud database services are also supported:

• Azure Database for PostgreSQL

• Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

• PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

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.

Recommended Server Configuration

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.