On 12/19/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote: [snip]
rsvg is beating the pants off Batik by a factor of 6; on my laptop the average image in the sample took *two seconds* to render, compared to a third of a second for rsvg.
Java is traditionally slow for command-line-type tasks, with VM startup and JIT overhead inflating times significantly. It's possible that we could get much better performance by starting up a single VM and sending multiple requests to it.
If we can get performance out of Batik that approaches or exceeds librsvg, it may be desirable to consider switching.
[snip]
Another engine to keep our eyes on is inkscape, which also can be used as a batch rasterizer. While it, like rsvg, lacks the completeness of Batik, it has a couple of qualities worth our attention:
1) Unlike rsvg it is actively developed and will one day be reasonably feature complete. (it will soon have filters for example) 2) Unlike both rsvg and batik it's also a full authorship environment.. in a perfect world we'd expect all renders to be consistent, but they are not.. so if we're going to be wrong it's better to be wrong in the same was as a tool people can actually use.