[Swftools-common] hello! pdf2swf is amazingly slow, help?

[Miles Ward]

Hello new list friends! I'm using pdf2swf, and can't seem to identify any bottleneck in my setup (cpu, memory, disk IO, etc), and yet converting large (~30mb) PDF files takes minutes!  I do not saturate any of my 8 processor cores, plenty of memory free, I've tried it in a ram disk and on SSD storage.  Any clues as to what I could do to accelerate processing?  Happy to generate logs or other debug support info, or to provide more details on our setup.

Basics:

Amazon EC2

m2.4xlarge instance, which is 8 core and 68gb of memory

Amazon linux (which is itself a CentOS/Fedora derivative)

Python 2.7

<5% cpu utilized during a multi-minute conversion run.  

Smaller files do go faster, but there's no "knee", so a file 1/100th the size is taking around 1/100th the time. 

We've reproduced locally on i5/core2duo laptops, with roughly identical behavior.

Thanks in advance!