Generating Thousands of PDFs on EC2 with Ruby
http://railsdog.com/blog/2009/12/generating-pdfs-on-ec2-with-ruby/
The caveat of this decision is that in addition to the numerical outputs, three graphs and a summary (both in HTML and PDF) would need to be generated for each permutation. Since there were 3600 permutations, this would amount to 18000 files in total. Initial local runs of our generation process took about 30 seconds for each permutation, mostly due to embedding the graph images into the PDF. On a single machine, that would take 30 hours of uninterrupted processing! Clearly, this was a job for “the cloud”.
