wkhtmltopdf and phantomjs both worked similarly, currently I'm using phantomjs.
And I'm not splitting pdf but splitting html generation work load, and then create individual pdfs from those html chunks. Then they will be joined together (using pdfunite). I found this much faster then joining html and generating large pdf.
Ok. Are you using phantomjs 1 or 2 ? Any reason to choose phantomjs or wkhtmltopdf? We are using wkhtmltopdf because it creates Table of Contents for PDFs and also clickable links