I've tried to find answers to this elsewhere, but coming up short. I'm running Inkscape 0.45.1 on a Windows XP box (SP2) running on a Pentium D 2.8GHz, dual core, with 2GB RAM.

I'm working on a very large file, heavy with gradients and blurs, which I'm exporting to PNG at 300 dpi: 21450x10800. It has been running for hours, almost a day.

I only see it taking up one processor, the other one is idle. It does not seem to be memory bound at all, as I'm only up to about 1.

The question I have is that I don't understand why Inkscape isn't using more of my computer's resources. This could be done nearly twice as fast if it used both processors. I see the same behavior on a Linux Fedora Core 6 installation with similar computing hardware. Is there a setting to use both cores or more resources that I'm unaware of?

Any advice? I'm on a deadline and didn't expect to run into this issue. Thanks in advance.

Try using a svn build (easiest on windows probably) there were a couple of bugs in 0.45 that meant the time to export rose exponentially as you increased size, that have been squished since then.
(http://kaioa.com/node/30 has a bunch of info)
wrt the dual core stuff, theres a lot of legacy code in inkscape that isnt thread safe meaning things can get pretty messed up if we try multi threading it as it is. I believe there was someone looking into making us more thread safe, but I dont know the status of that work.

I appreciate the insight, Simarilius. I'll give the SVN build a go. Too bad about the multithreading given how many multi-core machines are common now, hopefully that'll drive up the motivation.

Thanks,
Richard

Multi threading will take a while. However, there will be a multi threaded export extension really soon now, which fills the gap temporary. It will use more RAM than a proper solution, and it will be limited to document/canvas exports, but it scales quite nicely - almost linearly actually (if you have enough RAM, that is).

Win32 snapshots are over here (requires 7zip for extraction):
http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/?M=D

How many threads are there and which threads aren't synchronized?

Is OpenMP in the plans or just 2 core development?

Its single threaded currently, I believe that the changes discussed to make it multi thread safe would be scaleable, but you'd need to discuss with MentalGuy and co really. The Dev mail list would be the best place to get an answer from someone who actually understands all the issues involved, my knowledge is purely from having read their email discussions on the list, cant claim to understand all the ins and outs of it.

Simarilius, your advice was great. We built the SVN version on Linux FC6 and it exported the PNG in just a few minutes without any glitches. Thanks for saving us.

Kind regards,
Richard

Glad to hear it worked for you ok. know what being on a crunch for a deadline and having unco-operative software can be like