2009/8/13 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 7:19 PM, hk_knghk.kng@web.de wrote:
Helder Geovane kindly asked me to post this here, after I published a comment at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:SVG_image_support#Batik_server_revisited This started out when a colleague posted a proposal on strategy wiki of throwing some foundation money at the active development of rsvg. I wanted to counter this with an old question: why not use Batik instead? The decision for rsvg in 2006 was based on the asumption that a Java application was a bad idea due to overhead. At this time, a user proposed a http Server app based on Simple (http://www.simplframework.org). He published a demonstration version (http://batikd.sourceforge.net/), but noone reacted, and his work stopped. Now I have taken a look at his approach, and I find the results are not that bad, for an early development stage: in most cases, the batikd rendering times are two or three times those of rsvg, and in some specialized cases (extensive use of filters), batikd is even faster.
I published some batch-batik performance numbers back when this was discussed. It wasn't too appealing.
I did some a year and a half ago, they should really be redone:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SVG_benchmarks
I still hold the position that if we were to use anything other than rsvg it should be inkscape, since at least then users could have a hope of some degree of bug-compatibility WYSIWYG. ;) (and inkscapes performance is attractive... and at least all the crash bugs I reported were fixed :) )
Yuh. My tests it came out very slow, and not a good idea unless you're running Windows (since it comes in a standalone package) - but others have suggested that could be starting it afresh every time - if it could run from the command line with a single instance, it could be a bit faster, I don't know.
- d.