Well, maybe we can try to help, AMDs CodeXl is a free analyser. If enough people are willing to participate we can give the devs a hint where to look at.
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks ... ne/codexl/

It is easy to use.
- Start CodeXL
- Menu Profile -> Profile Settings -> General -> choose Krita in the Target Application (executable Path)
- Just Press F5, CodeXL will start Krita and recording analyse data.
- After Krita has started close it.
- Now we have recorded a performance analyse of the startup.
- The analyse data is opening now.
- It appears left in the CodeXL Explorter, just rightclick on it and "Open Containing Folder"
- There is the data, pack it and upload for the devs.

Maybe a dev take a look at it if is usefull, or check if we should set special options.
If you want some samples from me just tell.

Hey hi everyone, figured I'd chime in since I'm experiencing the sluggish Krita syndrome as well.
I run Krita on a a laptop (both 2.8.3 and 2.9 suffer from this I should point out) with these specs : win7x64, i73630, GT660m, 8GB ram. I tried running it with both the actual graphics card and the igp (the "optimus" thing), same results : moving a simple 8bit grayscale layer lags behind, like, several seconds. Painting is ok, although it does slow down using very big brushes (I suppose it's normal). There's also a weird sort of freezing thing happening once in a while : I can't pan the view, can't use any tool, but the qt widgets, menus and everything are still responding. What sort of information, software or hardware, should I provide to help narrow down the cause of the issue ?

Oh and startup takes 22 seconds with a few programs in the background, nothing too heavy, I guess it's ok... Maya still takes one minute to load up so it looks real good in comparison...

Hadrien

I have the same problem. Krita takes at least 40 full seconds to load. Airbrushes and curve/harmony type brushes are also slow to the point of despair. I'm on Windows 7 64bit. I have only 4 gb of ram and an intel core2Duo (built my PC about 6 years ago) but Photoshop, Blender and all other graphics software I use are not slow.

just to chip in my experience on a win 8 machine: i have no problem with the speed, except for the starting up process, which takes a really long time (starting up the program + creating the first new empty document). it's so slow that i prefer to leave krita on all the time...

Okay, I was completely misguided. The slowness comes from my image being 16bit RGB... 8bit RGB works just fine but 16bit makes processing too expensive I reckon. However Krita startup time has thawed like butter under sun with latest 2.9.1.

I've been having some issues with it running slow, as well. I don't really mind the slow start-up times, but lag while drawing is really difficult to work with. I'm running Win7-x64, i7-4770, 8gb ram, 1tb hdd, Radeon r9 270x, and a Wacom tablet, so I've got more than enough power to run it smoothly. Photoshop starts up for me in under 3 seconds, but Krita takes about 18 seconds to load. It's not long, but it is 6 times longer than PS. Like I said, I don't even really care about load time, even if it took several minutes, but lag time while drawing is killing me.

Try playing with the autospace option in the brush editor: some brushes are really close spaced, especially some larger ones. We're not sure why, but that gives more problems on Windows than on Linux.

Is there any progress in terms of making Krita faster on Windows?

I know it might be to too general of a task, but the evidence is quite overwhelming.

Are there any efforts to alleviate that?

The problem, as stated before, is that we cannot reproduce the issue on our windows devices, and to find the actual technical causes, we need to get a license for VTune, as that's the only profiler that can actually give sensible information in regards to Krita on windows. Boudewijn is still lobbying for a license at intel.

Because we can't sit on our hands till then, we've been focussed on bugfixes/qt5 port and the last kickstarter goal: layerstyles.

I did install krita 2.9.2 and it is still extremly slow:/ You can take a look at the screen.
This is new canvas, 8 bit rgb, 1600x1200 100 dpi, two layers incuding background, simple brush, wacom intuos 5.
No any other softwares opened.

I'm sorry, but I really object to blanket statements like that. I do not doubt that you experience performance problems, but it is emphatically _not true_ that "Krita is extremely slow on Windows". Windows systems are way too different in countless ways to make a general statement anyway.

But neither on my Windows 7 desktop with nvidia card or on my Windows 7 laptop with Intel video chip is Krita noticably slower than on Linux. Those are my dual boot systems: on my lowest-spec Surface Pro 3, a 600 dpi A4 image is perfectly fine, and on my broadwell Intel SDP, ditto. I haven't had problems on a Dell XPS 12 or on a Lenovo Helix either -- those were all Windows 8 or 8.1.

My problem is that without a system that shows performance problems like yours I can't do anything about your problem. Heck, even using vtune or another profiles on _my_ system won't tell me what's up with yours.

Considering that for a lot of you, 2.8 is fast, it might be an idea to try out the files on http://files.kde.org/krita/windows/ one by one. These are all the development builds of Krita 2.9, if this slowdown snuck in, we might be able to track down in which of these development builds it snuck in.

Check the about krita window for the git hash, which is written like (git hexnum), because we then know from when the build was git-wise.

As silly as it might sound, my old antivirus (avast) slowed my computer and thus krita down a bit. I switched to bitdefender and haven't had any problems since. It could very well be a driver/hardware issue, although Krita did load slow in most recent iterations but now that seems to be mostly fixed. I would also check the sizes of your custom patterns, animated or regular brushes and reference images. Loading larger files such as those on startup can effect the speed or performance of Krita as it would in photoshop using large complicated brushes or opening large images via adobe bridge in photoshop for example. I don't experience lag on pc or my surface pro 2. I wish we could pinpoint what the real problem is but it's not I don't believe windows 7. I just most recently upgraded to win8 up until then i was using krita in win7 no problem.

Hi everyone,

Just downloaded the Krita 2.9.2 ZIP version and I have installed it on Windows 7 - 64 bit

My hardware is:
CPU Intel I7 2630QM;
8 gb RAM;
GPU Nvidia Geforce GT 540M (driver 344.75 version);
HDD 750 Gb.

I have made two speed-tests with Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 2014 always running in the back-ground.
Firefox 36.0.4 was running in the back-ground as well (on this same Krita Forum )
I have recorded my test-speed with BB Flash express 5 (naturally, this video-recorder slowed down a bit my Krita painting...)

1)
Firstly, I have tried with the same setup of rdanhoffer:
8 bit rgb, 1600x1200 100 dpi, two layers incuding background, simple brush; OpenGL ON
In short, no slow down noticed on my Windows 7 - 64 bit system.

2)
Second test made with:
8 bit rgb, 2500x2000 300 dpi, two layers including background, basic tip; OpenGL ON
Once again, no slow down noticed on my Windows 7 - 64 bit system while painting....

Here you can take a look at the video recorded during my second speed-test:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/309 ... D-TEST.avi

Ok, I tried to turn off openGL in Krita settings, and brushes works fine. But paning, zooming and rotating canvas work slow.
When I try to turn on openGL, I can not paint because brushes works to slow. But then I can zoom an rotate canvas:)