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Large memory usage when using Publisher


Craig L

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I have a problem with Publisher using up nearly 20gb of memory & it's slowing my Mac down.

I have 20gb of free memory on my macbook pro,  the document I am working on in Publisher, is A4 and 120 pages, 90% of which is photographs and according to the info on it, it is 21.1mb. The photos take up less than 1.5gb on my hard drive. As soon as I open the document, my free memory drops like a stone and within 5 minutes, I have less than 1gb free on my mac, this slows it down to an unbearable speed and makes using Publisher a chore.

I can't work like this, as everything is taking far too long. I'm really hope there's a simple solution to this and that someone can point me in the right direction, because I don't want to have to go back to an expensive Adobe subscription for Indesign.

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Hi Craig L,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums, firstly let me apologise for the delay in responding! Would you be able to upload a copy of your document and the images used (presuming they're linked) to our internal Dropbox account using the link below. We will be able to investigate the issues you are encountering with your document.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/XlgMeXwTMmCwTZ1BruuU

Thanks

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Hi Craig L,

Thank you very much for the files.

Unfortunately it was crashing for me using the 1.7.3 Mac App Store build, however I was able to use the 1.8 beta and open the file.

When you say Publisher uses nearly 20gb of memory and having less than 1gb left are you referring to Hard Drive space on your Mac? 

If so then I believe this is happening because your system RAM is getting filled up, and is then using your Hard Drive as a swap disk for the additional memory needed for an image heavy document. I found that after opening your document and scanning through the the pages it took up an additional 15gb of HDD Space I had. Any further actions I wanted to do then started to eat into the remaining HDD space.

Unfortunately the only simple 'solution' at the moment is to try and free up (80-100gb if possible!) hard drive space on your Mac. This should help work around the issue in the meantime and hopefully allow you to continue editing your documents. Additional operations will eat up more space, but hopefully you'll have enough to be able to complete the work. Let us know how you get on!

I will get it passed onto development to see if the handling can be improved to stop it taking up as much resources as it currently is. 

Thanks,

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Hi Sean,

It's eating into my ssd storage. My mac has 121gb of ssd storage, I have 18gb of that free, there's no way I can free up 80-100gb. I'd have to delete everything I have on here, so that isn't a realistic solution.

What is causing this problem? Is it my Mac that's not able to cope with this document, or a problem in Publisher?

Is the only realistic solution to buy a mac with more ssd storage?

Edited by Craig L
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On 11/3/2019 at 11:03 AM, Craig L said:

Hi Sean,

It's eating into my ssd storage. My mac has 121gb of ssd storage, I have 18gb of that free, there's no way I can free up 80-100gb. I'd have to delete everything I have on here, so that isn't a realistic solution.

What is causing this problem? Is it my Mac that's not able to cope with this document, or a problem in Publisher?

Is the only realistic solution to buy a mac with more ssd storage?

It is due to the large amount of images in the document that are getting put into memory (which is then getting offloaded to the SSD). However we should really be handling this better so it is with development to be looked at.

Development have mentioned that the drive usage for the document tops out at around 25GB, so if you can free up just over that you should be ok for the time being.

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  • 2 months later...

Sorry, but the math does not add up. I'm having a similar problem. The file in question is 21 mb on disk, exported it's around 300 mb, but it is using 10GB of memory or put another way, 10,000 MB RAM for a document that is a fraction of that and I'm not counting the disk space it is using.

The same thing was happening with the latest release (at the time) of Affinity Photo AND Designer until I reverted to an earlier release. This worked for months until this week I noticed it doing the same. A simple file of 80MB or so will take 8,000MB of RAM. This is not beta software, I've brought this up in the forums before as well as many other people, and I never seem to find an answer. 

I've used Adobe CC, Medibang, Krita, Gimp, Inkscape, DAZ 3d, Sketchup and more on this same system and have never experienced this sort of lag time. I don't think it is a question of our files, but of how Affinity is handling data and how it is holding it in memory. Long after I shut down the programs, the memory stays in use. I still cannot recommend any of your software to my students, but look forward to a day when there is a viable option. 

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  • 1 month later...

I just encountered this same problem. Publisher is using 20GB of memory! When I open the file the laptop's fans kick on high and the battery is eaten alive. The file I'm working in is 60MB on disk and 188 pages. Nearly all the pages are linked documents and none of them are that large. Most of the graphics are fairly simple vectors. I have 64GB available storage on the SSD.

 

 

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I've found a workaround for this issue. I took my 188 page book and quartered it into 4 files. Each file consumes roughly 6GB of memory, which is more than manageable for my machine. With that said I don't think  it's a memory leak because all 4 files add up to roughly the same amount of memory consumption to the original file.

To assemble all 4 files into one book I export each file as a PDF and import all the PDFs into a new file by using "Document" > "Add pages from file". The new file with all the pages imported consumes a fraction of the memory. I haven't imported all 4 PDFs yet but I have imported 2 of them and it's only consuming 2.3GB. @Sean P that invalidates the assumption that a file heavy with images is causing the massive memory allocation. I'm a developer and I'm guessing the issue is caused by the individual objects that make up each spread. I'd argue objects should be released from memory if they are not needed for the page being worked on.

I really like this software and I consider myself an early adopter and willing to make sacrifices to my workflow as the product grows. However, if this issue is not addressed in the near term I'll have to abandon it for InDesign.

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  • 1 month later...
On 4/6/2020 at 10:45 AM, cleversprocket said:

I took my 188 page book and quartered it into 4 files. Each file consumes roughly 6GB of memory, which is more than manageable for my machine.

 

On 4/6/2020 at 10:45 AM, cleversprocket said:

To assemble all 4 files into one book I export each file as a PDF and import all the PDFs into a new file by using "Document" > "Add pages from file". The new file with all the pages imported consumes a fraction of the memory. I haven't imported all 4 PDFs yet but I have imported 2 of them and it's only consuming 2.3GB.

And they call it a solution for PROFESSIONAL layout design. This is a workaround, but it's not how professionals should have to work because of bad software. I've dumped Affinity for now until this is resolved and instead am using Clip Studio which takes 1/10th of the Ram for the same size files. 

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  • 1 month later...

Version 1.8.3

I have the same problem on a 96 page project with half the pages used (say 150 images).

It seems as publisher copies the images to RAM/Scratch Disk as uncompressed files:

Publischer closed: MacOS disk: 28GB free
Publisher & Project open: 3GB free
Where all images from that project (JPEG exports) only take 2GB.

 

Setting a warning on SSD usage doesn't make any sense other than making me sad.)

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 9/18/2020 at 3:33 PM, Bryce said:

Any solutions? I am running into this being unusable with large links.

I've found that if I work in a file straight through, meaning I don't close the program and reopen it, then the software doesn't have a memory issue. However, if I duplicate a file or create a new document and add pages from a different document then the software consumes a huge amount of memory. For instance, I created a 191 page document made up of placed pages from other documents and the memory went up to 7GB which was very manageable on my machine and I didn't experience any lag. But when I created a document and imported only a quarter of the pages from the 191 page document using "Add pages" the memory shot up to 13GB and the software became unbearably laggy. This was from a fresh launch of the software and no other documents were open.

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  • 5 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/6/2021 at 2:41 PM, losgelaufen said:

Are there any updates on this problem? My only chance on working on my documents is closing it every 10 minutes or so. 

For me changing „Ansichtsqualität“ from „Bilinear“ to „Nächstgelegen“ solved the problem. I’ve added a screenshot so you know which settings I’m talking about. 

B6B6CCF1-6498-49EA-9ADA-0CF1C5A882C5.jpeg

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14 minutes ago, randomly said:

For me changing „Ansichtsqualität“ from „Bilinear“ to „Nächstgelegen“ solved the problem. I’ve added a screenshot so you know which settings I’m talking about. 

B6B6CCF1-6498-49EA-9ADA-0CF1C5A882C5.jpeg

Sadly it doesn´t solve this problem for me. :(  But i noticed on every restart of publisher it jumps back to "Bilinear".

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8 hours ago, randomly said:

For me changing „Ansichtsqualität“ from „Bilinear“ to „Nächstgelegen“ solved the problem. I’ve added a screenshot so you know which settings I’m talking about. 

B6B6CCF1-6498-49EA-9ADA-0CF1C5A882C5.jpeg

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Even with thus latest release, almost no activity within Publisher yields high system memory usage. This was not the case with 1.7 and earlier. 

This is a GIGANTIC usability problem. I get the Mac colour wheel spinning for 20+ seconds for every 10 seconds of work I manage on a document.

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Same for me. No changes with the latest update.

Edit:

Okay i think it has maybe something to do with placed PDF. I had an idea since i have another problem with placed PDF files which i posted here
I made a new 58 page file with placed pictures on every site which have all around 15 MB. Nothing special is happening.

Then i did the same with just PDF files. The largest one has 5 MB. Most are around 1MB or even smaller. And the memory usage starts to rise.

 

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  • 2 months later...

I have the same issue... Macbook Pro M1, never had an issue with InDesign running 100 page portfolio full of vectors and images, in Publisher I am having big issues... 24GB ram/disc usage for 30 page portfolio, deadline in 5 mins, Publisher keeps asking for more space on disk, turning off only other app running (Finder) and then itself... kind of hell.

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  • 4 months later...

Same problem. Simple documents are using up to 6 GB of RAM on Publisher. I have to keep force-quitting. Sadly, I'm going to have to go back to Adobe, because Affinity products (for which I've been an enthusiastic supporter) simply aren't productive due to this unsolved issue.

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