Re: [gentoo-user] Inkscape-0.48.1-r1 really sloooooow

[Mick]

Thanks Michael,

On Sunday 22 May 2011 00:51:45 Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 05/20/2011 08:49 AM, Mick wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I installed inkscape-0.48.1-r1 on a x86 machine.  For a few
> > seconds/minutes after opening an svg image rendering is fast as
> > expected, but soon it gets bogged down to the point of seeing the
> > image being rendered in slow motion, a row at a time if e.g. I scroll
> > up or down the page.  Only 20% of RAM (of 3G total) is being used at
> > the time, so I'm guessing this could be something to do with the ATI
> > video card?
> >
> > Other graphics apps open at the same time (e.g. Gimp) do not have such
> > problems rendering graphics (albeit not svg).

> I don't suppose you have a ton of fonts installed? I've had Inkscape
> lock up for like 5 minutes at a time when it was loading the font list
> (either at startup or when opening the text dialog).

No, although I do have a few fonts and a couple extra in ~/.fonts, but the 
application opens straight away.  The image does not have fonts in it and it 
opens reasonably fast.  As soon the user zooms in or pan around the image then 
the slow rendering starts.

I have now looked a bit more into this problem and it seems that inkscape is 
slower in MSWindows (dual boot machine).  So I concluded that this is an 
inkscape issue, rather than Gentoo specific.

Also, googling around it seems that zooming in a lot (more than 1000%) or 
using many filters (as this user is on the particular image) slows down 
inkscape:

http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8721

As suggested in the thread above, a work around until the inkscape code is 
improved is to change the View mode to 'No Filters'.  This trick restores 
rendering speed to reasonable levels.
-- 
Regards,
Mick