hi everyone,
i've been playing around with the pdf-lib the last couple of days trying to produce a large image (126cm wide) for print. As my output grows more complex (naturally) the pdf takes more time to finish.
at some point it starts to take so much time, that i'm not sure if it's still working or not. therefore i've written some code to benchmark the pdf-lib on my machine:

import processing.pdf.*;

float stepsize=15;

size(900,600,PDF,"benchmark_"+hour()+second()+".pdf");
background(255);
strokeWeight(stepsize/20);
stroke(100,0,0,100);
noFill();

int gc=0;
for(float y=0;y<600;y=y+stepsize){
 for(float x=0;x<900;x=x+stepsize){
   ellipse(x,y,stepsize*0.75,stepsize*0.75);
   gc++;
   println(gc);
 }
}
println("d o n e ! !");
exit();


using this code i'm able to produce a pdf containing 60,000 ellipses (stepsize=3) in reasonable time. if i set stepsize to 2 (=135,000 ellipses) the pdf just "stays" at 0kb, even if i wait for more then half an hour. no error messages and i also tried this: http://processing.org/faq/bugs.html#memory

so i guess my questions are:
-) is there some kind of limit how much you can draw into a pdf?
-) or is there at least a way to know if the pdf is still worked upon?
-) has somebody a recommendation how to output large(10mb+) vector graphics?

thanks in advance,
daniel

(btw: i'm on win xp pro sp2, 3ghz pentium4, 1g ram -if this is of some sort of importance...)