Strange slowness when viewing PDFs

I've recently been running into a unique problem I've never had before. I read lots of pdfs. On my full-size laptop, every pdf loads extremely slowly. Every reader I use (Evince, xpdf, zathura, apvlv, and Acrobat Reader) maxes my processor for a bit on loading the file. I then have to wait anywhere between five and twenty seconds when scrolling for the next page to load.
This shouldn't be a hardware problem - the files work just fine on my netbook which has similar hardware (equal CPU speed, same amount of RAM). It also shouldn't be an issue with installed packages - both run Arch with a similar software loadout and are kept relatively updated.
I suppose I can just use my netbook, but it's much easier to read on my larger screen.

lagagnon wrote:
Try launching xpdf from a terminal to read the pdf that gives you the worst response. Do you get any error messages in the terminal ?  - if yes post them here. Watch "top" in another terminal. Is the PDF app maxing out your CPU? Do you in fact have the correct video driver loaded for whatever video GPU you are using? (show us the output of lspci and lsmod).
Also, can you upload a particular PDF that you are having problems with so we can look at it? Thanks...
I generally launch from a terminal anyway - easier to quickly switch pdfs that way. No errors.
Checking htop while a file is open shows no abnormal CPU usage until I try to scroll to a page that hasn't yet been loaded. That instantly increases CPU usage from ~2% to 100% for 5-20 seconds. The particular pdf app doesn't matter - I receive the same results when monitoring all of them.
Video drivers aren't a problem - there's only one modern Intel driver and I'm using it. I'm currently on a dialup connection and my laptop doesn't have a modem, or I would paste the whole output. As I'm typing this in by hand, I'll just type the relevant parts.
lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
lsmod shows the i915 module.
I can't upload a pdf at the moment - they're all tens of megabyte and that would take a good hour at the least on this connection.
My hard drive died last Christmas so I bought a substantially larger one. I don't recall any problems before that. I don't see why that would affect performance, but that's been the only real change between then and now.

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