1. PD4ML JSP taglib is a lightweight wrapper for PD4ML API – from resource consumption perspective it makes almost no difference which approach is in use. However we recommend to use the taglib where possible, as it implicitly solves some HTTP-specific issues you may face using “naked” PD4ML API in webapp scenarios (it sets correct cache control HTTP headers to avoid failures of particular combinations of MS IE+Acroread etc)
2. PD4ML is thread safe (the shared internal resources are protected from race conditions and dead locks), but its methods are not re-enterant: you should not call render() methods of a single PD4ML instance from multiple threads simultaneously. The best practice would be to create a new PD4ML instance for each conversion request. Multiple PD4ML instances may work safe in parallel, but you should take into account – HTML rendering is a resource consuming task. Too many processes may take too many system resources.
Here is some useful info about:
http://pd4ml.com/performance.htm
