Slow performance "Not Responding" when toggling layers

[Aus_James]

My partner uses Inkscape and she's having an issue.  When she toggles layers on and off (see attached picture), Inkscape takes about 10-30seconds to do this and goes into a Not Responding state. 

I'm a systems engineer, so investigated this.  It's using around 20% system memory, disk use is 0%, CPU goes up to 25% exactly.  It's almost as if it's using one single CPU core to 100% of the four cores, but when I check, it doesn't max out flatline any single CPU. 

When I do this on a separate system with only two cores, it uses 50% exactly, but again, doesn't flat line any single CPU.

Win 7 Pro 64bit and we installed 0.91 64bit version.

Any ideas what's causing this? 
It appears to be a limitation of the software, not any performance issue with the systems we're using.
Can we assign more CPU to the program?
I've increased the CPU priority to one below realtime.  I've tried changing CPU affinity with no difference.

File is nearly 14MB in size. 

[Lazur]

Hi.

That screenshot seems to be zoomed in to the drawing. Maybe youare using filtering -blurring by accident- that causes the trouble -as in this recent topic.
Switching rendering mode may help.

Other problem could be the image is too intricate. 50000+ nodes can cause a visible latency here.


Keep an eye to unused defs, they can also lead to crashes -file/clean up document.

Snapping can also lead to timing out but that's a different problem.

[brynn]

Welcome to Inkscape Community!

Yes, I agree with Lazur that it sounds like a performance issue related to possibly several different things specifically, but large file size in general.  One good thing, is that using layers can is a good way to help alleviate the problem.

A 14 mb file will challenge Inkscape on almost any computer system.  Filters and as far as I understand, imported raster images, need to call on the cpu, to be displayed/rendered.  But otherwise, Inkscape uses the system RAM to function.  So the part of the problem related to a large number of nodes (for example) probably can't be alleviated with changing the core threads setting or other filter display options.  (At least that's my understanding.)  How much RAM in your friend's system?

For a multiple core system, Inkscape has a way to use them all, as opposed to just one.  Note that I barely understand about the cores and stuff, but I do know enough to explain how to set Inkscape to use them.  Edit menu > Inkscape Preferences > Rendering > Number of Threads.  Your friend should put the number of cores in that field.  (And then restart Inkscape, as noted.)

Also, on that same Inks Prefs page, you can find some other settings that could help with filters, if you're using filters.

Here's a tutorial/article I wrote to help users identify the problems areas for performance, and learn how to work around them.  I tried to include all the basics, but if there are any particular steps you want to discuss in detail, please feel free.

Tips to Avoid Performance Issues

Actually I've never heard of or experienced snapping as contributing to performance issues.  Snapping can be affected by performance issues, and it can make snapping hard to use.  But as far as I know, snapping doesn't contribute to the problem.  I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any bug reports about it.