I've been getting frozen screens a lot lately. Sometimes if I wait several minutes it will unfreeze. Others, I have to shut it down using task manager and restart it again.

Any ideas what's happening and how to stop this from happening?

Hi glasslady,
This is a problem that most of us have to deal with, from time to time. Usually, it is related to the SVG file that you're working in being too large for Inkscape to handle on your computer. Most of Inkscape's features depend on your computer's RAM, to perform properly. I think that having a lot of filters or imported raster images in a file, uses the CPU a little more than RAM. But mostly it's the RAM that matters.

Although I did see once a case where someone wasn't working in a very large file. But they had so many SVG files open at the same time, that it was using up all their RAM.

I have 4 gb of RAM on my computer, and as far as I can tell, that's about the bottom limit for being able to use Inkscape relatively freely. But if I'm working on a file, and it's growing and growing, and by the time it reaches just 1 mb, I'm starting to have performance issues. I can still work in files up to 5 mb, but I have to be really careful about what I ask Inkscape to do. For example, if I wanted to select everything in a 5 mb file, and move it, it would be hard to do, because of the delay between me moving the mouse, and Inkscape moving the object. And it might even make Inkscape crash. I have seen people using Inkscape on computers with 2 gb RAM, but they are pretty limited in how large of files they can work on.

So because we get this kind of message posted fairly often, I wrote a little article/tutorial (a while ago). And there are some more replies to that post, with even some more tips.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12160

I guess there could be some other problem, besides the freezing being a performance issue. But I'm not aware of anything else that might cause it. Maybe others know some other things.

Oh, well there is 1 more thing that I know about. In version 0.91, if you installed the 64-bit version, for some people, Inkscape works very, very slowly. It can be fixed (oddly enough) by just hiding the rulers. So if you have that version, you can test by hiding the rulers. If that makes a big difference, you can either use Inkscape without rulers, install the 32 bit version, or go back to 0.48.5. Although I seem to remember you were debating whether to upgrade to 0.91. So maybe you're still using 0.48.5.