User:Mr.Z-man/SVG

I've been working on an experimental new SVG converter.

The inkscape people added an option last September to run inkscape as in interactive shell. This allows multiple operations to be done without having to start up and shut down the whole program for each one.

I wrote a quick Python program to run inkscape in shell mode as a daemon process, then wrote a short C program to communicate with it via a UNIX socket.

I did a few profiling tests, similar to those David Gerard did in 2008, though less exhaustive or scientific. The tests were run on a system running Fedora 11 as a guest OS on Sun VirtualBox (Windows Vista host OS) with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processor with 1024 MB memory given to the VM.

The source code and installation instructions are here.

Test 1

The first test compared ImageMagick (6.5.1-2), Inkscape (0.46+devel), my Inkscape daemon, and rsvg (2.26.0). I didn't test Batik as I didn't want to bother with installing it.

I used 25 randomly chosen SVGs from commons, the PNGs produced were 600px wide. Only total time was calculated for 15 runs. The min, average, and max time for each:

	ImageMagick	Inkscape	Inkscape daemon	rsvg
Minimum	28.93s	37.57s	14.30s	8.08s
Average	42.21s	54.92s	23.96s	12.94s
Maximum	65.24s	81.26s	45.34s	23.31s

Test 2

In this test I did 1 run over the same 25 images using the inkscape daemon and rsvg only, directly comparing their performance on each image. The time given after each file is the time difference. A positive number means rsvg was faster, a negative number means the inkscape daemon was faster:

File: Amphoe_1046.svg : .36s
File: Blason_Antsirabe.svg : -.91s
File: Blason_ville_fr_Elbeuf-Empire.svg : .94s
File: Bundesstraße_1a_number.svg : -.02s
File: Bw_Buchholz_Gleisplan.svg : .04s
File: Georgia_46_Connector.svg : .05s
File: Hammarö_vapen.svg : .03s
File: Iowa_414.svg : .01s
File: Kernkraftwerke_in_Deutschland.svg : 1.11s
File: Kit_socks-grey.svg : -.02s
File: Mapa_levantamiento_campesino_1932.svg : .49s
File: Map_-_NL_-_Noordenveld_-_Wijk_04_Peize_-_Buurt_20_Peizermade.svg : .15s
File: Map_-_NL_-_Vlaardingen_-_Wijk_05_Vlaardinger_Ambacht_-_Buurt_03_Babberspolder_West.svg : .06s
File: Map_of_Georgia_highlighting_Meriwether_County.svg : 5.89s
File: Map_RuaDeSacaduraCabral_zh-hant.svg : .54s
File: Namerikawa_in_Toyama_Prefecture_Ja.svg : .02s
File: Oregon_Route_131.svg : .47s
File: Ortho_minkowski_05.svg : .02s
File: SF_PERMIT_PARKING.svg : .03s
File: South_Carolina_512.svg : .08s
File: Tarrant_County_Texas_Incorporated_Areas_White_Settlement_highlighted.svg : .41s
File: Tophane_Müşirliği_Anteti.svg : .05s
File: TTC-signal-block-yellow.svg : -.02s
File: US_666.svg : .10s
File: USA_Zapata_County,_Texas_age_pyramid.svg : -.02s

Notes

Inkscape leaks memory slowly, and it starts to become an issue after doing several dozen conversions, causing it to become extremely slow. This necessitated a change in the program to restart the inkcape subprocess after every 50 conversions. I chose 50 as an arbitrary number, it could possibly be increased, especially on a system with more memory.