Comment 8 for bug 179640

I'm dropping the milestone and priority on this, since while it's an issue, it sounds it may occur in limited situations. It certainly seems plausible that it could be a memory issue, and that avenue ought to be explored more. It looks like while your physical memory is almost completely in use, you've still got plenty of swap, so it probably is not a memory exhaustion issue.

It may be worthwhile to boot a different kernel (and/or distro) on the same hardware and see if the issue can be reproduced using the same version of Inkscape. If so, then it would be also useful to test on a different machine with a similar memory configuration (e.g., boot with the mem=313M kernel option).