Hello, I don't really know how to phrase this, on one hand it may sound like I am whining and on the other it's a real issue I experience. If this should be in another list or posted as a bug report, just yell.
I think I'll just jump in.
The thing : Inkscape 0.45 gets gradually slower and less responsive over a period of time.
My system : Old AMD Athlon 1Ghz, 1 Gig RAM, Ample drive space (IDE), Nvidia something or other card, Kubuntu Dapper.
The caveat : For some reason or other I have the very real (and seemingly unique) experience with GTK apps all running very slowly -- well the gui response makes them appear to be slow. Apps like Firefox and OOO and Gimp and wxPython stuff and Tomboy, etc, are all painful. Still, I am used to that basic sluggishness.
I have been using Inkscape quite a lot in the last week doing icons and other designs and for the first ten minutes or so it's allright. Even fairly complex drawings (stuff all over, many layers, some bitmaps) are not a problem. After that, the refresh rate begins to slow. After about half an hour, it's in the order of seconds, not milliseconds. It's like move 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 re-draw, with big black squares gradually filling-in. I have found that I cannot leave tool dialogs open -- especially the fill/outline one. I must open one, use it and then close or shade it and move it off the canvas area.
After 30 mins to 1 hour Inkscape really becomes impossible to use. I cannot select a single node without a long pause as the mouse freezes and then suddenly jumps into life (dragging the node radically). At this point I save my work and close the app. I wait for a couple of minutes and re-start it. All is well for a while. Repeat.
BTW - what I am describing is not an illusion of slowness, it really does get slower.
Oh yeah, one more thing, when I close Firefox it seems to give Ink a boost in speed but it does not last.
So, what's going on? Am I running some processes or other apps that are known to interfere with Inkscape? Is it more of a GTK thing? Is my AMD chip a known culprit? Is my RAM bad perhaps? How can I profile this so the stats are more useful to the coders of Inkscape?
Okay, thanks for reading, Donn.