[cairo] Very slow performance

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, Chris wrote:
> My image has about 3500 paths and on my machine this image takes less
> than a second to load and render in Inkscape (librsvg/libart based?).
> Even Inkscape feels slow compared to commercial applications when
> handling this file.

Actually, the renderer in Inkscape is 'livarot', which replaced the
older libart-derived renderer that had been used previously.  livarot
handles corner cases a lot better and is more 'correct', but some have
noticed it to be a bit slower than desired, especially on images with
large numbers of elements.

Longer term, we want to switch inkscape to use cairo, so your test case
image is very helpful in identifying what's still needed.  (Actually,
I'm impressed by how close things are.)

One question - did you export the SVG you created in Inkscape in 'plain
SVG' mode?  If not, could you try that for comparison?

It may also be worthwhile to try rendering the SVG using Batik, for
comparison purposes.

> The SVG image I'm using is here:
> http://www.functionalfuture.com/radical/centi_unfinished.svg.gz

This is *sweet* btw, it amazes me what people are doing with SVG these
days.  :-)

Bryce