Hi. This design is become very difficult to work on. The biggest problems occur when turning layers on and off. Sometimes takes 15 minutes.
I have almost 4 gig of ram and my system uses 1.5gigs. Sometimes I run out of ram and the computer shuts down.
I'm looking for some geeky advice that doesn't involve upgrading hardware. Perhaps a lighter operating system that doesn't use so much ram?
Aslo CPU seems to be the limiting factor when changing views;

I've had some weird symptoms like:

I had three plant (svg images) on my design that every time I selected them it took almost ten minutes. I finally deleted them and replaced them by importing a new plant.svg file and the problem stopped.

I keep a folder with hundreds of .svg files of plant icons. When designing, I drag the files from the folder onto my design. Most of the files are under 100 kilobytes. Some are larger and don't know why. I've reduced files that were 4.1 MB to 5.2 kB by opening them, copying the plant icon and then opening a new file and pasting the icon to the new file. Then saves as... and replace the old file. Why was the old file so big? Could this be a clue to why my big design is so slow to work with?

Here is an example of a file that was bigger than it should be: and if that doesn't work then here:

Here is an example after I've pasted it to a new document to reduced the size:

Here is my design:

Please share with me your thoughts. Thank you.

Pasting into a new document probably doesn't transfer unused definitions (for gradients, patterns, swatches, ...).

You can have that easier by doing File > Clean up Document.

As for the question about simplifying the SVG image, please share a link to the file. There isn't one here that we could look at.

Hmmm. does this link work for you?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B3B2S ... sDjtAAPEJ6

Also, when I used the touch select tool (left click + alt) to select objects, inkscape freezes and my cpu goes to 100%.

you have not told us what your current system and platform are so it's a bit difficult to make recommendations

I have almost 4 gig of ram and my system uses 1.5gigs

I'm not sure exactly what that means. If you really only have 1.5 gb of RAM, that's not really sufficient for Inkscape these days. It would be enough to work on one of your icons, but not for many of them. 4 gb should be sufficient for small or moderate sized images -- under 1 or maybe 2 mb in size.

The link you provided to your SVG file shows us the SVG/XML code. It doesn't show us the image. For those of us who know how, we could take that code and eventually open the image in Inkscape. When I tried, my file manager tells me it's an invalid SVG file. Maybe I didn't do it right, I don't know. But it's much easier for us, if you can give us the SVG file rather than the code.

As far as I can tell, it's a massive file.

Are you saying that tiny image which says "Trillium erectum...." is the whole image? Then judging by the amount of code, the file Design.svg has much, much more in it, than just that!

If you can open Design.svg in Inkscape, try File menu > Clean Up Document (with nothing selected). Watch the status bar when you do that, and you can see how much data was removed. Then Save the file. Then check to see if the file size changed.

If that doesn't help, we would need to see the SVG file.

Yes, it can be downloaded.
Clean up document removes 48000 unused definitions. It doesn't help gaining a lot of speed, though.

I noticed that many things are grouped lots of times. Often, it's a 'group of 1 object', which is basically just wasting space and memory.

Many items are used multiple times, but they are not clones.

And, most importantly:

Your file contains a massive amount of objects (> 16000 even without ungrouping).
Most of them isn't even visible, because they're hidden by a clip.

Trying to ungroup them fails miserably, even the 'Deep ungroup' extension doesn't stop running.

So, there is just too much stuff in your file!

One trial was to save as 'optimized SVG', this results in a 11 Mb file, available from here:

https://framadrop.org/r/YFAak853HO#OafQ ... mFUpJThGc=

It already is a lot faster. To improve the result, you can then still delete all items that are outside the clip. To see them, switch to outline mode (View > Display mode > Outline).

For any new files:

- make use of clones for anything that is identical and complex (e.g. large paths, groups)
- don't create 1-object groups
- clean up the document repeatedly
- find a computer with a fast processor (the single core must be fast, Inkscape isn't good at multithreading, except for rendering filtered objects)
- avoid importing pdfs if you can, those usually produce lots of data that is far from optimized
- remove any objects that you do not need.

your file is too large to work with effectively. You have a great many layers, all no doubt very useful, but since so many of them are turned off (hidden) I suggest you create separate much smaller files each with only the elements that you want seen at the time.

The approach you are currently using (I guess) is sort of cinematic or like a program where all the information is contained in a single file and is revealed as called for, but Inkscape and SVG are not really designed to be used that way in my opinion. Better to use a Powerpoint type program linked to many separate images. This would likely be less demanding on your system as well!

EDit: I see Moini has said much the same but in much greater and more useful detail ...