I've noticed that Inkscape will sometimes run rather slowly on my Mac, especially when I am zoomed in close on a group of many different objects. I tried quitting some of my unnecessary running processes using Activity Monitor and I downloaded the latest version of XQuartz; these did help, but just barely. It also speeds up slightly if I quit everything and then restart, but this is rather short-lived and far from convenient.

Do other Mac users have this problem? If so, how do you fix it, or can't you?

It's slow on all operating systems when you are zoomed in. It's also slow once you add blurs. You can reduce the amount of detail that is drawn on the blurred items in the document preference shift cntl P >> filters. It helps a little but not much.

EarlyBlake wrote:It's slow on all operating systems when you are zoomed in.

How slow do you mean? When I say slow, I mean nearly at a stand still. It takes the better part of a minute for all the graphics to render correctly, and in the mean time the screen is split up into a bunch of horizontal bars, some from what I'm zooming into and some from what I'm zooming out of. When it finally does finish rendering, there's like a ten second delay whenever I select an item and when I move it too. This is not very productive, and it defeats the purpose of zooming in that close if I can't properly edit the details I need to edit.

Alas, this might simply be something I'll have to deal with unless I buy Illustrator or FreeHand

I get that when I'm zoomed to about 20,000 (Intel Q9300) magnification on my desk top and about 2000 magnification on my lap top (Intel T5500). So really zoomed. I get the lining. Also get it, if the file has paths with lots and lots of nodes, like over 2000. Or if I have say over a 20 paths with blurs. You can putting stuff on different layers and the hide some the layers so they don't have to get drawn. The will speed things up. Does a Mac have an equivalent of the performance monitor under task manager that Windows have, so you can see the percent usage on the processor and how much memory you are using.

I was finally able to resolve my issue with this particular item I was making. Turns out all the little paths I had in it were all at 100% blur, but for some reason they didn't really show it :/ anyway, this is what was slowing it all down. I unblured them all and simply changed their opacity instead to get across the same idea. After that it ran at normal speed. Thanks for all your suggestions though, EarlyBlake, I'll have to remember them for future use

MarbleIconsInc wrote:(...) this might simply be something I'll have to deal with unless I buy Illustrator or FreeHand

Why can't you buy LineForm or (for example) ZeusDraw? Adobe sux.