Hi,

I've been using Inkscape for quite some time and in general I'm very happy with it.
Currently I'm running Kubuntu 11.10, amd64, with stock Inkscape which seems to be 0.48.2 r9819

My main issue is with performance. It seems that after running multiple things for a long time (not just Inkcape), the Inkscape performance goes down the drain. Looking at top, it is Xorg that is hogging 90% of CPU and 2Gb of memory, but it happens only when I try to display a menu in Inkscape, or other UI activity in Inkscape. Displaying the File menu can take 5+ seconds. Other applications, like Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. are fine. Restarting Inkscape restores its performance. I tend to have multiple inkscape documents open, but all are typically simple icons.

I'm not running out of RAM, I have 16Gb, and CPU is Core i7-2600K.
Graphics card is somewhat of a weak link:

fglrxinfo says:
display: :0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3450
OpenGL version string: 3.3.11005 Compatibility Profile Context

with 256Mb of memory.

Now I wonder if someone is not seeing this degradation of performance on linux? Could my weak graphics card cause Inkscape to exploit some pathological performance path in Xorg, running out of texture memory or some such...
Does more graphics RAM help?

Thanks,

H.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

Inkscape taking over 5 sec to display a menu is indeed inappropriate, lol. I can't speak to potential Linux and/or graphics card issues, but just want to make sure we understand the whole scenario. When you say "multiple Inkscape documents open" how many typically are open at the same time? Even if the docs are individually fairly small, if they all contain a filter (including blur), and you have say.....15 or more open.....well, I can see the potential for a performance issue. Yes, even with all your resources.

I don't use filters much, but I quite enjoy the Spirograph extension. It tends to generate a really lot of nodes. And if have say 5 docs open, each containing 5 spirograms, I've overloaded something, and am prone to crash. Of course, I just have a measly 4 gb RAM.

Anyway, I'll leave it for others more knowledgeable than me, to offer helpful comments. But it seems possible to me that Inkscape might not have been tested on the development side, in this way (many, many multiple instances open). (I'm sure they test "many" but maybe not as many as you use all at once.)

I use Ubuntu as well.

However, I've noticed that Inkscape takes a great deal of time to load up. I'm less inclined to let it bother me though because I am also aware of the large number of fonts that are installed on my system. I'm not sure if this is your issue as well. We *Ubuntu users are spoiled with a very large assortment of available fonts from the repositories.

I personally think this has a lot to do with Inkscape's lengthy load time.

I notice that Inkscape throws the processor up into the "very busy" zone for it's start time. Then it appears. Then there's a second period of time where the processor is as busy as it was when it was first loading Inkscape. I usually don't mess with it during that time. As soon as I spot that the processor has relaxed, the menus work normally. Opening an second instance of Inkscape happens quite quickly.

brynn wrote:Welcome to InkscapeForum!

Inkscape taking over 5 sec to display a menu is indeed inappropriate, lol. I can't speak to potential Linux and/or graphics card issues, but just want to make sure we understand the whole scenario. When you say "multiple Inkscape documents open" how many typically are open at the same time? Even if the docs are individually fairly small, if they all contain a filter (including blur), and you have say.....15 or more open.....well, I can see the potential for a performance issue. Yes, even with all your resources.

Not that many, 4-5 open documents. Last time the problem occured I was masking bitmaps. One of them was 12Mb image, but rest was very basic stuff, just rectangles, text, gradients...

But I just noticed that later in that session I could no longer play videos. Logging out and restarting X server was required to cure that.
Looks like the AMD/ATI driver has issues releasing resources, or something.

I'll keep testing.

Oooh, well no, it's probably the 12 MB image!