App is slow on large files

You see

You open a complex SVG (many paths, many nodes) or a project with thousands of objects. The app becomes sluggish, selecting takes a moment, panning lags, edits feel delayed.

What is happening

Beam Bench renders the canvas every time the project changes. Lots of geometry means lots to render. Some operations (selection bounds, layer membership lookups) scale with object count.

Fix

If the SVG has unnecessary node detail

Many SVGs are exported with way more nodes than needed (every curve sampled as ten Beziers when one would do). Reduce:

• Use the Trace Image dialog on a rasterized version with sensible Min Node Distance if the original is too dense.
• Open in Inkscape and use Path → Simplify before importing.

If many objects could be grouped

Beam Bench treats each object individually. Grouping reduces the active-object count.

• Select related objects.
• Ctrl+G to group.
• Operations on the group are faster than on its members individually.

If many objects are on the same layer with the same settings

The Material Library and layer-level settings make this fine logically, but the canvas still draws each object. If they share appearance, consider merging into a single path (Boolean Union via Boolean Assistant) where it makes sense.

If you have many large raster images

Large rasters consume memory and slow canvas redraws. Downsample before import, engraving rarely benefits from above 600 DPI input.

If your computer is the bottleneck

• Close other heavy apps.
• 8 GB RAM minimum for complex projects.
• Integrated GPUs work but discrete is faster for the largest projects.

If panning / zooming specifically is the issue

See Canvas stutters, that page covers the canvas-render path directly.

Verify it worked

• Project loads in reasonable time.
• Operations feel responsive.

Still stuck?

• Canvas stutters.
• Send a feedback report with the slow project attached.