On 8/8/07, Joshua A. Andler <joshua@...533...> wrote:
Is this due to the nature of a "bloated" (not really bloated, but I used the term because it's human readable) format or a parsing issue or something else? I'm just curious if there's anything that could possibly be done to improve the performance.
You identified the problem yourself - it's the slowness of the renderer and the incredible memory hogging by livarot. While by itself it's simply slow, its memory consumption sometimes makes it deadly slow, up to and including frozen.
Try viewing the same page in outline mode. Note the memory difference. That's, more or less, what you will get in regular mode too once it's switched to cairo - at least for flat colors. It will likely be slower for gradients (don't know by how much), and it will be about as slow as now for blur because we still do blur ourselves. But still this should give you an idea.
Of course there are other bottlenecks besides the renderer too, but it makes little sense to search for them now because they're unlikely to make big difference anyway.