[rtiangha]

Well, I answered my own question. While I had the card pulled, I decided to manually apply the disable sickel mod and it worked. It took about two minutes and five seconds for that first pdf to load. I never timed without the mod, but I assume the kill time is 1 minute?

And now loading each subsequent pdf is near instantaneous (or at least it seems to be the speed at what it used to be). However, it doesn't seem to survive a reboot (which makes sense, if it's a RAM thing). After rebooting, it again takes just a bit over two minutes for that first pdf to load. Once done, loading pdfs is fast again (it doesn't matter what the file size of that first pdf is). I assume that's because at that point, the pdf renderer is loaded into memory. I'd probably have to do the same thing again if it ever got paged out.

So not sure what I can do there to fix or improve that load time. I might just leave the disable sickel mod installed though, and try to keep it in mind when debugging things in the future.