[Mediawiki-l] Further adventures in SVG

[David Gerard]

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.