http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SVG_benchmarks#Further_testing
I ran a benchmark overnight on my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop (X in Failsafe, i.e. not running KDE). Batik, ImageMagick, Inkscape and rsvg, each run 115 times through 58 SVGs from Commons of varying size and complexity.
Results (times in seconds):
median real mean real median CPU mean CPU Batik 139.71 139.95 137.02 137.04 ImageMagick 112.43 112.67 111.7 111.73 Inkscape 51.43 51.52 51.18 51.2 rsvg 25.97 26.03 25.8 25.825.8
The laptop is a Dell Latitude D610 with a 1.6GHz Pentium M and 512MB memory.
* Inkscape was visibly thrashing the disk, suggesting it uses *rather a lot* of memory ... * Batik's JVM crapped out several times (39 out of 4485 rendering attempts) for no apparent reason, not on any particular SVGs. * Note that ImageMagick is not just slow, it's known to be buggy with SVG rendering. * I did not check the resulting PNGs, just threw them away.
Personal verdict: rsvg all the way. Inkscape if you have a lot of memory and its dependencies are less trouble than rsvg (e.g. on Windows).
- d.