Program to render large SVG files

I am trying to view a large SVG files (about 20 MB). I tried using squiggle from batik, but it has been rendering for at least 20 minutes without producing any results. A similar file about half the size rendered in under a minute.

If I drag it into a Chrome tab, it appears to render it, but at a size of about 5mm x 5mm, so it looks like a solid rectangle. Ctrl-+ does not make it bigger.

The file is a graph produced by fdp from graphviz. There are tens of thousands of nodes, each filled with one of about 8 colors and several lines of text. There are a similar number of arrows connecting the nodes.

What program would work well for rendering this? I have access to Windows or Linux.


Adobe Illustrator can open/edit/save SVG. Using Illustrator CS5 I saved the 30 MB Illustrator vector sample art Blue Mirror.ai to SVG 1.1 (resulting file 56 MB), opened the SVG file, and edited successfully. Windows Task Manager shows Illustrator's RAM usage is 562 MB RAM (private working set).


In looking for an answer to this question in 2021, the answer still appears to be Chrome (or Chromium).

You can use Ctrl-F to find text in the SVG.

I do not know why Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- were not giving the expected Zoom result, in 2021, that works fine (Chromium 73.0.3683.75 built on Debian 9.8, running on Debian 9.13).

Note that Chrome starts the display at the top-left of the image boundary, so the image may be lower and to the right.

I've used this method to display a 107MB SVG with 224181 nodes - generated from networkx in python.