I found that Inkscape loads files very slowly and frequently freezes for minutes during use. There were network drives mounted in the system, and when the network was unavailable or I connected remotely, the freezes in Inkscape lasted much longer.
I found out that the cause of the problem is that Inkscape checks the file history synchronously, and if it takes a long time to retrieve the data of files that have been opened previously, the graphical interface freezes.
The cause of Inkscape’s slowdown in this case is that it regularly checks the most recently opened files, and if some of these files are on a network drive and can’t be accessed, it waits, which blocks the user interface.
The solution to the problem:
- Select the Preferences menu and the Interface submenu.
- Set the ‘Maximum documents in Open Recent’ field to 0.
- Clear the list of recent files with the button.