I'm a professional UI designed who uses inkscape daily, and sometimes my files get pretty complex and the sluggish performance in inkscape really puts a damper on my speed.

All I want is not a new feature, I just want a speed boost.

- Here are some of the things that I find are slow -

Working with multiple layers, turning layers on and off, collapsing layers, expanding layers.
Zooming in and out
Selecting sub objects when there are lots of elements on a canvas.

I am pretty sure inkscape redraws the whole canvas every time there's an event that happens, even if you are moving a single box, it will redraw all the boxes on the canvas. Only redrawing the area being affected by a transform would greatly improve performance.

the main thing going on for 0.49 is refactoring, including switching the renderer to cairo. I've not tried the cairo branch, but the speedups people are talking about for some ops should make you pretty happy. Theres a big improvement in memory usage apparently too.

I hate to say "Me Too," but, well, yeah.

I'm not even close to being a professional, but even at my Serious Amateur stage I'm finding that "Inkscape Workarounds" become a bigger and bigger part of my work flow as the drawing gets bigger. "Big" for me is a boardgame map that's over 3Mb in size with maybe 2 dozen layers, lots of clones and pattern fills, and lots of Filters. Getting anything done on such a map involves turning off as many layers as possible, displaying without filters or just displaying the wireframe, and saving saving saving about every 3 minutes. Even then, there's plenty of Zen moments where I have to re-acquire patience upon encountering yet another memory fault.

To me, Inkscape is impacting things more than it should. I can't imagine being a professional and trying to get a big job done.

That said, I love the program and am sticking with it. I'd just ask for a bit more attention paid to performance issues for the sake of the professionals (and wanna-bes) who are running into the bleeding edge.

@tuomo

The attention is already being paid

the main thing going on for 0.49 is refactoring, including switching the renderer to cairo. I've not tried the cairo branch, but the speedups people are talking about for some ops should make you pretty happy. Theres a big improvement in memory usage apparently too.

Happy Dance!

It should be noted that even if the move to cairo does not speed Inkscape up by orders of magnitude; it will mean that we will be using a supported renderer that is used in other software as-well; and not one that is unmaintained and cannot be fixed (nr-render).

AMEN to that thought, I think you're preaching to the choir!
I'd just like to work for more than 10 minutes without having the program crash. If it doesn't already have it, an auto saving function (to the folder and file you're working in), would be great too.
Though Inkscape really is amazing, the programmers and developers have done an outstanding job, and I wouldn't use anything else.

flamingolady > go to preferences, save, and tick enable auto save. set the interval and restart.

i agree 100%

another head`s up for - more speed, instead of new feature gimmicks ^^

100+ new features won`t be of any help, when the program itself is lacking so badly
that one is unable to actually finish a complex picture drawn by using all the new features.

in short words - a porsch car without an engine is nice to look at, but can`t drive it though.

i ran into the same issues, not really pro in drawing yet..
but as i get better and better, my need for speed increases,
until the point where the workflow is completely killed by inkscape itself.

it is extremely frustrating for an artist, to own a powerful computer capable of so many things,
and then the program itself is preventing me from getting my art done.

i have many big and complex but unfishied work on my hdd, waiting to get done.

plus, i will jump to a new system 6x core 64bit with 16gb of ram,
so it is time to see a inkscapw win64x release so we can speed up inkscape
with more ram.

just my humble opinion

One could of course work on Linux / LXDE (Lubuntu, Mint LXDE et alt.). It's really fast.

For comparison: An elderly Asus X51L with an Intel single core 1.87Ghz. CPU and 3GB RAM and InkScape (on Lubuntu 32bit) is there 'felt' as fast as InkScape on a Win7-64bit 8GB Phenom II X4 965. Just imagine what could be possible ...

But the problem remains. InkScape has to be much faster.

I work since 0.45 with InkScape for web graphics on different machines with different OSs and I fear, that it isn't something what will be solved in 0.49. Maybe the developers think, "it's not our 'construction site'" to speed up the code for every rendering environment.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

It's my understanding that this new Cairo renderer will speed things up for everyone. Although I'm certainly not an expert. ~suv or someone else should be able to offer specifics.