Inserting duplicate animations in beamer

Question

Note: original title was "Is there a maximum size PDF that Latex can create?". I've edited the title to better reflect what I've discovered the issue to be.

I'm creating a presentation in Beamer and I'm including several animations, using the animate package.

This works well when I have about 6 animations and produces a fairly large pdf (~95 Mb). When I try to add a couple more animations however my compiler freezes after a while. No error message is given. If I comment out the new animations everything still works. I tried compiling using both pdflatex and lualatex but ended up with the same result.

Is there a limit to how big a pdf latex can make? Or some other explanation?

Edit 1:

As pointed out below the problem is not with the size of the PDF. I seem to be able to reproduce the problem by including multiple copies of the same animation. I've done some searching and I cannot find any reports of this happening elsewhere. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

If a MWE is needed I can try and provide one.

Edit 2:

Here is a MWE. It actually does compile, but it hangs for about a minute after adding the first copy of the animation. I tried letting my original presentation compile, but after an hour it was still hanging. I am using a Windows 10 machine.

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{animate}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{1}{99}
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{1}{99}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

animation.pdf

Answer 1

animate ensures that a graphics file/page of a multipage file is embedded only once in case of duplicate animations. It does so by verifying the MD5 checksum of the file to be embedded. Calculating the checksum is rather expensive.

In version [2017/02/24] the code was optimized to reduce the number of MD5 calculations to the bare minimum. This accelerates embedding of the external file for animation (animation.pdf link in the OP) by a factor of 2. All subsequent copies take about the same time for processing as the first, original one, if not even less.

Here is a piece of code for testing, which writes the elapsed time in "scaled seconds" (see pdfTeX manual) to the terminal:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage{animate}[2017/02/24]

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
    \pdfresettimer%
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{}{}
    \typeout{anim 0: \the\pdfelapsedtime}\pdfresettimer%
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{}{}
    \typeout{anim 1: \the\pdfelapsedtime}\pdfresettimer%

    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{}{}
    \typeout{anim 2: \the\pdfelapsedtime}\pdfresettimer%
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.4\textwidth]{8}{animation}{}{}
    \typeout{anim 3: \the\pdfelapsedtime}%
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Answer 2

The PDF file has a cross-reference table that records the file offsets for indirect objects. These offsets are stored with ten decimal digits. This limits the maximum file size to about 10¹⁰ bytes (approximately 10 GB).

Other limiting factors:

• File system.
• 32-bit software needs to be compiled with large file support (AFAIK pdfTeX has large file support).

Summary: Except for ancient software, generating a file with 100 MB should not pose a problem.

Answer 3

You have some good answers already, but to give you a new datapoint, at my job I work with a 10,000 page book that comes in at about 600mb. That's the SAS/STAT User's Guide, done with pdflatex.