Add a scratch disk for virtual memory performance

[AlessioDG]

Hello,

As a user coming from Photoshop, it comes natural to me to compare Affinity Photo with Adobe's application.

Well, I noticed there's no way to change the scratch disk for the virtual memory to write in order to boost the app performance when running out of RAM.

I'm working on an iMac with two internal drives: one rotational drive for data and a SSD PCIe card for the system and apps (former Fusion Drive).

While the rotational drive has a capacity of 1 TB, the SSD PCIe card has a lower capacity of 128 GB, so because of the slow speed of the rotational drive, I set up an external 256 GB SSD drive connected to a USB 3.0 port as a scratch disk, then Photoshop (and Illustrator as well) had a speed bump in overall performance thanks to the fastest speed when it comes to write and read data on and from the virtual memory.

Unfortunately, I can't do the same thing with Affinity's apps — I'm not sure where they write the virtual memory data, yet for sure if the apps write on the little remained space in the SSD PCIe card or on the slowest rotational drive, both ways lead the iMac to suffer from poor overall performance when RAM runs out.

Is there a chance you could add the possibility to switch the scratch disk from the default to another one?

Thank you.

[lxne]

Please make this happen!

[ryan427]

Dear Affinity Team, yes pleas make this happen!

I have a similar System, but with a SSD Raid as scratch disk. This makes an old version of PS faster than Affinity!

[NotMyFault]

I’m a bit sceptic if this provides any benefit. 

At least on Windows PC all operations accessing disks are painfully slow, no matter if ssd or spinning rust. 

Affinity used only 1 cpu core while import / export (except batch / export persona), and never saturates a data disk (ssd or hdd)  

And once you opened/ imported files affinity does not regularly access anything on your data disk.