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Affinity apps eating up crazy amounts of disk space?


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Hi there,

as of recently I noticed that free disk space on my iMac (OS 10.11.6) gets mysteriously low. Keep in mind here: not on my data partition where all my "regular" files go, but on my system partition where the OS and just the applications as such live.

I had a hunch before that I actually seem to notice free space going down when or after using the Affinity apps – just today I had about 1,7 GB less space on the drive after I had worked for an hour on a really small (just 2,9MB!) file in Publisher (and having used Designer inbetween to copy an illustration from there to my Publisher layout file). Even after quitting the apps and hoping to clear some of their (suspected) caches this doesn't change.

When I look into my Applications folder I see that Designer, Photo and Publisher are by far the biggest chunks in there: each having just over 1,7 GB (well exceeding the system requirements for installing)! This surely can't be as intended, can it? I'm currently using Publisher 1.8.3, Designer 1.8.2 and Photo 1.8.2.

Now I'm actually quite anxious to further use the apps for fear they will eventually eat up so much available disk space that I run into problems with my other apps. Has anybody noticed a similar behaviour on their machines or knows what to do about it?

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Around 1.7 gigs is the the size of my Affinity apps. I looked at Indesign, the application folder is around 1.4 gigs so seems right in line.

Do you have a Time Machine backup? If not, Mac OS will do it's own Time Machine backup using your hard drive, you can turn it off if you google the terminal command. One of the few things I hate about the Mac OS. I had my space dwindle down and could not figure it out till google gave me that answer. I cleared about 80 gigs by turning off the backup. Again this is running in the background and is supposed to free up space as you need it, when you do not have an external backup drive connected. 

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11 hours ago, ashf said:

I see, it says 1.34GB for Photo, 1.27GB for Designer and 1.04GB for Publisher.
So 1.7GB is little more than requirement, but I don't feel "considerably less"...

I am not sure that for example the 1.7GB number for Designer is always really the amount of disk space it uses on Macs. If I do a 'get Info' for it, its size is listed as "1,706,291,462 bytes (1.37 GB on disk)." Digging a bit deeper using the right-click "Show Package Contents" item in the Finder view of the Applications folder, the 'get info' size for the Frameworks folder is "1,310,199,976 bytes (1.01 GB on disk) for 3,307 items."

Opening that folder & doing a 'get info' on many of its Dynamic Libraries shows that they are compressed on disk. For example, for the "liblibkernel.dylib" the 'get info' size is shown as "3,888,176 bytes (1.3 MB on disk, compressed)." Most but not all of these *.dylib files are also compressed. The same is true for some of the items in the Resources folder & also for the Affinity Designer Unix executable in the MacOS folder.

(Note: If you want to check this on your own Mac, it is much easier to use Finder's "Inspector" instead of its "Get Info." To do this, hold down the alt/option key when using Finder's File menu & the "Get Info" item will change to "Inspector." Alternately, use the CMD+Option+i keyboard shortcut.)

The remaining difference between the 1.27GB spec & the actual 1.37 GB on disk is probably due to either the difference between the gibibytes & gigabytes digital units and/or total bytes used vs. the sectors they use.

The same thing is true for Photo on my Mac but not for Publisher (or the current Publisher beta). I believe that is because I bought Photo & Designer through the Mac App Store, but bought Publisher through the Affinity Store.

Also note that I am running Mojave on an APFS formatted hard disk. I would be interested in hearing if anything is different on Macs using the older HFS+ format.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, PixelPest said:

macOS HighSierra/iMac/Journaled HFS+

SerifApps.jpg.bfb47d387a45b93e77f940006fc40617.jpg

Curious about that 'Designer 173' item & how it differs from the one below it (other than it size).

Also, if you bought any of the apps from the Mac App Store, do you see any indication of compression, for example in the Frameworks folder?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, Sofa Gas Rue said:

Sound a lot like the issue I've been having with Affinity Photo eating disk space while working on docs and then regaining that space once I close the Application. – I'll follow this thread incase some good info crops up.

I don't think it is the same issue -- this one is about the amount of disk space the app itself uses, & your issue is the amount of working space it uses while working on documents. 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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18 hours ago, Lorox said:

recently I noticed that free disk space on my iMac (OS 10.11.6) gets mysteriously low. Keep in mind here: not on my data partition where all my "regular" files go, but on my system partition where the OS and just the applications as such live.

I remember such an unexpected enormous use of system disk space was reported before – unfortunately I can not remember to have read any successful solution to avoid this, it rather appeared as an issue which still needed investigation. Right now I found only one thread with two similar situations but note that both are using a large total amount of resource file sizes and/or report a large .afpub file size (different to your 2,9 MB). [ In previous Affinity app versions (1.7.x) were issues reported for .afpub file size with linked native Affinity file types (.afdesigner and .aphoto), this issue got resolved with an earlier 1.8.x version, whereas files created in an 1.7.x version still may show the issue if opened in 1.8.x. ]

Maybe it can help to limit a reason for your issue if you detect where the memory is going to, means in what file/folder it gets written to cause your massive reduction of free disk space. Usually the macOS search tools make it difficult to search for such items but with "FindAnyFile.app" or "Whatsize.app" you can easier search for large sizes stored at any place within system folders. (In "FindAnyFile" press the option key when clicking the search button to force a search as root or sudo).

Alternatively to a search for size you could search for a file named "PersonaBackstore.dat", the issue in the thread I mentioned above. It is stored in your hidden "private" folder (this is not in your user folder) and there within folders with 'cryptic' names, which may vary on different computers. This file was reported as culprit in this 2019 thread for an 1.7.x version of APub. by the OP user "PowerBug2.0": 90 GB in macOS, and on 02 March 2020 by the user "Frank-Hans": 224 GB in Windows – though it did not became clear why these users got that 'waste' of disk space while others didn't.

 

18 hours ago, Lorox said:

When I look into my Applications folder I see that Designer, Photo and Publisher are by far the biggest chunks in there: each having just over 1,7 GB

I currently wouldn't mind these application package sizes, it is not related to your bigger issue of 'disappearing' disk space. Note that apps with more than 1 GB can be common, e.g. iMovie 1,6 GB, Lightroom 2,25 GB, Cinema4D 13 GB. In particular the size of the latter also points out that it plays a role where-to the app resources are stored: the app file itself can appear small if its developers make more use of system folders as e.g. Application Support and others.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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20 hours ago, R C-R said:

I don't think it is the same issue -- this one is about the amount of disk space the app itself uses, & your issue is the amount of working space it uses while working on documents. 

Right you are! skimmed too fast over the part where it stated it was the application itself!

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On 4/22/2020 at 11:22 AM, R C-R said:

this one is about the amount of disk space the app itself uses, & your issue is the amount of working space it uses while working on documents. 

Sure? – I had read the opening post vice versa, with main issue of loosing disk space while working:

> "notice free space going down when or after using the Affinity apps! (...)
today I had about 1,7 GB less space on the drive after I had worked for an hour (...) in Publisher"

The file size of the application is a second and rather a secondary thought when the OP compared all app file sizes in the application folder.

@Lorox, before I heaven't been aware about this mentioned amount of "1,7 GB" reduced disk space. This is not extremely much. However, since you noticed this amount as irritating, now I wonder if it maybe a signal for running out of RAM? So you loss of disk space may be caused by the virtual memory management in macOS, which uses disk space if the physical RAM gets entirely used. You could check e.g. what your Activity Monitor.app will show in this situation, e.g. in its "Cached Files" and "Swap", which both use disk space when activated.

In the sample screenshot of this Apple article you see a used swap of 10,52 GB:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464#memory

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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On 4/22/2020 at 11:18 AM, R C-R said:
On 4/22/2020 at 9:57 AM, PixelPest said:

macOS HighSierra/iMac/Journaled HFS+

SerifApps.jpg.bfb47d387a45b93e77f940006fc40617.jpg

Curious about that 'Designer 173' item & how it differs from the one below it (other than it size).

So actually the sizes of the Affinity apps seem to be like that and it's not some quirk just with my install. Thanks for checking on that!

That „Affinity Designer 173.app" looks like something  left over from the previous 1.7.3 version. Maybe you didn't just update that one but installed the 1.8 version separately?

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1 hour ago, thomaso said:

before I heaven't been aware about this mentioned amount of "1,7 GB" reduced disk space. This is not extremely much. However, since you noticed this amount as irritating, now I wonder if it maybe a signal for running out of RAM? It may be caused by the virtual memory management in macOS, which uses disk space if the physical RAM gets entirely used. You could check e.g. what your Activity Monitor.app will show in this situation, e.g. in its "Cached Files" and "Swap", which both use disk space when activated.

In the sample screenshot of this Apple article you see a used swap of 10,52 GB:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464#memory

Thomaso, that's an interesting thought – thanks for pointing this out, I'll check on that one for sure.

I would have thought, however, that any temp or swap files would be cleared once I quit the app that's responible. In my case free space actually remained the same after quitting Publisher and Designer. It took a reboot to have free space back (though I'm not completely sure if it sums up precisely).

As of today I notice that since first waking the iMac (which has 12 GB of RAM BTW) from sleep this morning and working a bit (about 3 hours but not using any Affinity apps) free space on my startup disk has dropped by just 180 MB (including maybe 60 MB of Firefox cache). According to Activity Monitor no swap is being used. So today about (only) 120 MB are more or less unaccounted for which is not that much but might add up eventually if I don't reboot for some longer time.

Anyway I'll check on another machine soon where all the Affinity apps are also installed.

Thanks to all of you who so far contributed freely!

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1 hour ago, Lorox said:

So actually the sizes of the Affinity apps seem to be like that and it's not some quirk just with my install. Thanks for checking on that!

That „Affinity Designer 173.app" looks like something  left over from the previous 1.7.3 version. Maybe you didn't just update that one but installed the 1.8 version separately?

Nope. When 1.8 was released with all Boolean related tools borked I thought I`ll get a quick relief by getting a demo. Stupid, very stupid idea. First I received 1.73 which means the tools should still working as expected - BUT the files I was working on or tried to finish with 1.8 can´t be opened with its predecessor. Oh man - really?

 

On 4/22/2020 at 11:18 AM, R C-R said:

Curious about that 'Designer 173' item & how it differs from the one below it (other than it size).

It has tools that are still working.

Not sure if the sizes alone will tell you something. Sure more tools need more space and I have my custom brushes which are missing in the 1.7.3 demo.

ADVersionSizeQuery.jpeg.b153a21d9dbb2dc6d61709c13c3cf10f.jpeg

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43 minutes ago, Lorox said:

I would have thought, however, that any temp or swap files would be cleared once I quit the app that's responible. In my case free space actually remained the same after quitting Publisher and Designer. It took a reboot to have free space back (though I'm not completely sure if it sums up precisely).

Note that free disk space, shown in macOS finder, often isn't accurate. It both may get updated by the finder with a delay and also with wrong sizes. There are specific macOS-processes running in the background which don't hurry to keep the user up to date, they rather prefer to care for an updated spotlight database of file names, dates and locations than their size. You might have noticed such a delay when using opt-cmd-i for a bunch of selected folders: then it may take ages to get the total file size appear in the finder info.

You also might watch the user temp folder of APub when closing the app. If it doesn't get emptied entirely you may delete leftovers in this folder to free disk space. May be some files are kept for a faster work on the recent documents next time. I don't understand yet when/why this folder gets emptied or not after closing an Affinity app.
~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher/temp/

However, if your reduced disk space is around 1,7 GB I assume it is not much at all, no need to worry. But in case your system disk in general has a small amount of free disk space (~5 GB) than you might consider to move items to a different volume/partition. For instance the iTunes folder can become quite large and may easily get moved. Also, in seldom cases, there can be a temporary file of any application being left over and "forgotten" to delete by the system. A tool like "TinkerToolSystem" can help to detect and delete those. (Before using any free cleaning tool do a recherche to discover if they created conflicts for other users). Another option could be to free the cache of your browser(s), which may become quite large over months or years.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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3 hours ago, thomaso said:

You could check e.g. what your Activity Monitor.app will show in this situation, e.g. in its "Cached Files" and "Swap", which both use disk space when activated.

Like the Apple article says, Cached Files shows memory that was recently used by apps but is now available to be used by other apps. It does not use any disk space; on the contrary it is data left in RAM to avoid having to fetch it from disk if it is needed again. This improves performance because fetching the data from disk is slower than just reusing it.

App memory is the total amount of RAM currently used by all running apps & any lower level processes they require. Some of it may be Compressed, some shared by multiple apps & processes, & some of it Wired Memory (meaning it cannot be paged out to disk or used by other apps). Wired memory also includes kernel code and data structures that must never be paged out to disk, so Wired Memory will never go to zero. (See more info about Wired Memory here.) 

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Note that free disk space, shown in macOS finder, often isn't accurate.

Neither is Finder's "Size" info as displayed in Finder windows opened to show the items in an Applications folder. That is why I suggested using the Get Info or Inspector feature earlier in this topic to get a better idea of how much disk space an app actually uses. 

 

1 hour ago, PixelPest said:

Not sure if the sizes alone will tell you something. Sure more tools need more space and I have my custom brushes which are missing in the 1.7.3 demo.

The sizes shown in your screenshot are not the same as what the Info or Inspector window will show in the "Size:" field of its General section. The second 'on disk' number shown in parentheses is the one to pay attention to, because it may be larger or smaller than what Finder windows show.

Note that custom brushes, styles, assets, etc. & all other user-specific settings are not stored in the app itself so they will have no effect on app size. They are stored in sub-folders in the normally hidden user Library folder. If you bought the app from the Mac App Store, the path to them will be the same as shown here. If you bought from the Affinity Store, the path will be slightly different but still in the sub-folders in the user Library folder.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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46 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Like the Apple article says, Cached Files 

Indeed, you are right, these "Cached Files" are still parts of the RAM, not of disk space. Sorry.

In addition, I am now wondering whether the "Swap" is actually shown to the user as used disk space in any Finder view, or whether this Swap "simply" does not count and is ignored for the calculation of free disk space. Similar to the local Time Machine backups (the "Snapshots") which do not visually reduce free disk space, although, depending on the changed files, they may take up a huge amount of storage within their lifetime (and don't shrink e.g. if the backup volume is not available).

@Lorox, after all I would like to understand more what size amount you had in mind with your topic title "(...) eating up crazy amounts of disk space". – Was it related to the mentioned 1,7 GB only, or did you notice any major loss of disk space when running APub? In case you miss more than 1,7 GB can you detect in what file or parent folder it gets stored?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

@Lorox, after all I would like to understand more what size amount you had in mind with your topic title "(...) eating up crazy amounts of disk space". – Was it related to the mentioned 1,7 GB only, or did you notice any major loss of disk space when running APub? In case you miss more than 1,7 GB can you detect in what file or parent folder it gets stored?

As it happens I actually thought that nearly 2 Gigabytes really IS quite a crazy amount of disk space being unexpectedly taken/used while working on a simple single page (almost) text only document in Publisher... Having worked with the Adobe apps for decades I'm probably not used to a behaviour like this, while I, of course, do know that disk space and RAM usage by most apps has gone up significantly over time.

On my startup disk I have usually a bit less than 20 GB of free space and seeing that shrink comparatively fast and/or unexpectedly I get sort of nervous – can't help it, as it seems...

You're right: I guess it would be of great help to understand what's going on here if I could actually locate where those 1,7 GB go and thus identify the underlying routine. Maybe there's nothing to worry about after all. But so far I'm still at a loss at how to find out. As you will know with Spotlight you can actually search for files e.g. "last modified today" AND "file size bigger than..." but that didn't turn up any suitable results.

So I'm just keeping an eye on it...

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5 minutes ago, Lorox said:

On my startup disk I have usually a bit less than 20 GB of free space and seeing that shrink comparatively fast and/or unexpectedly I get sort of nervous – can't help it,...

You are right to get nervous.

In my opinion, and experience, 20 GB is too little, can you offload some files to a back up disk or just another drive? 

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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4 minutes ago, thomaso said:

In addition, I am now wondering whether the "Swap" is actually shown to the user as used disk space in any Finder view, or whether this Swap "simply" does not count and is ignored for the calculation of free disk space.

AFAIK, Finder does not show any 'swap' info directly but what Swap Used actually shows in Activity Monitor remains a bit of a mystery to me. I think (but am far from sure) that it shows the total amount of data paged to disk since my Mac was last started (so it is cumulative & not a 'snapshot' of the current use). The Apple support article just says it is "The space used on your startup drive by macOS memory management," which could mean almost anything.

Finder's Status Bar refers to "available" disk space, but that also may be different from free disk space, in part because it is updated 'lazily' & also because of potential complications involving offloading document data to iCloud via System Preferences > iCloud Drive Options, or one of the other arcane 'behind the scenes' optimizations the macOS does.

The bottom line for me is it all has become too complicated to understand on more than a superficial level. ☹️

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, Lorox said:

As you will know with Spotlight you can actually search for files e.g. "last modified today" AND "file size bigger than..." but that didn't turn up any suitable results.

That's why I mentioned above "FindAnyFile.app" or "Whatsize.app" for searching sizes, in particular of unknown and possibly hidden system files.

1 hour ago, Lorox said:

On my startup disk I have usually a bit less than 20 GB of free space and seeing that shrink comparatively fast and/or unexpectedly I get sort of nervous

Like Bruce, I would try to enlarge free space, instead of worrying about watching it day by day, hour by hour.
It might help you first to get aware of the largest consumers within your user-sub-folders to come to an decision.
Note that macOS even allows to outsource your entire user folder, e.g. to the data partition you mentioned initially. The user folder can be quite a big part on your system disk.

Also, depending on the time you run this disk, it can help to restore the entire system partition from a Time Machine backup via the Migration Assist. In such a process the hundreds of thousands of system files get re-written to disk in a specific, from the system preferred order, without gaps and without some cache files, e.g. the system Cache folder (which usually doesn't get back-uped)... it is a refreshing procedure for a system (and doesn't demand neither a manually, clean OS nor application installation).  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203981

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

(so it is cumulative & not a 'snapshot' of the current use)
(...) too complicated to understand on more than a superficial level. ☹️

For years I assumed the Swap value to be cumulative, too. Until I noticed some weeks ago this Swap value varying up AND down over one day without reboot.

However, all those values are rather estimations than definitely true, just because it is not clear what exactly is measured. Which actually doesn't really matter, because it is enough to recognize a tendency and to react accordingly, for instance by closing apps, increasing memory size or outsourcing data. So the superficial level doesn't necessarily hurt as long as I draw appropriate conclusions. ("I don't need to understand my car's engine to refill gasoline in time" <– sounds like a book title;)

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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19 minutes ago, Lorox said:

I guess it would be of great help to understand what's going on here if I could actually locate where those 1,7 GB go and thus identify the underlying routine.

I think you are confusing several different things:

  1. The disk space used by the application itself. This does not change other then when a new update to it is installed on your computer. The most accurate & reliable place to see how much disk space it uses is via the 'Get info' or Inspector window.
  2. The working space the app uses when opening or editing a document. This includes various temporary files created both by the app & by the OS to support processes the app must use to work on the document. Some of this may be (& usually is) shared by other processes running to support other apps or system level functions.
  3. Virtual memory (VM), a technique used by the OS to page out data from RAM to disk & page it back in as needed, & to discard it if it is no longer needed. The disk space used by VM is controlled by the OS memory manager, not by the apps, & may be organized along 'page' boundaries that do not match exactly the size of application objects.

This makes it very difficult if not impossible for users to see how it all works together.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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