Very probably, but I feared that it was the fault of some framework they were using, so I wanted to stay clear of whatever they were doing. My library can export even huge PDFs in less than 500ms - but I have heard this "half an hour for a PDF" from other applications, too. I have no idea what these frameworks are doing. They seem to be accessing the disk a lot, like a lot. I noticed that the time for exporting a PDF went down (in my old company) when we switched to Macs that had an SSD. In my library, this wouldn't make much of a difference, since the document is first generated in-memory and then written out to the disk with buffered IO.

Users usually just blame their computer ("it's slow, let's grab a coffee"), but to me this performance is unacceptable.