title: wkhtmltopdf extremely slow on Debian without X-server
body: <p>Converting a pretty small HTML-file to PDF takes 2 seconds for my test enviroment (Windows 7). On the production web server the same file (Debian) needs 193 seconds. </p>
  
  <p>The web server is being run with a managed hosting solution. They installed wkhtmltopdf and told me I had to use xvfb-run for it to work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 640x480x16" wkhtmltopdf "input_file.html" "output_file.pdf"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now that I've complained that using this command it takes 193 seconds to generate a simple PDF, they say there is nothing they can do about it. Is that really so?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit</strong>: Somehow, my managed hosting support solved this after some nudging (now it takes 0.8 seconds). I think they might have recompiled the static wkhtmltopdf binaries or something. I now run wkhtmltopdf without xvfb-run.</p>