Affinity apps eating up crazy amounts of disk space?

[thomaso]

11 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I think you are confusing several different things:

Maybe you, too? – To me the initially mentioned "1,7 GB" don't mean the size of the app but refer to reduced disk space while working – unlucky coincident, this is just the same value mentioned later in the initial post but in a different thought. The main idea and concern of Lorox in my understanding was the 1,7 GB disk space loss when working (not after installing the app). The entire discussion above about app file size was possibly a misunderstanding of a thought besides the first mentioned 1,7 GB.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

The main idea and concern of Lorox in my understanding was the 1,7 GB disk space loss when working (not after installing the app).

If that was what @Lorox meant, then that disk space should have been freed when the app was quit. But in the first post, there was this:

Quote

Even after quitting the apps and hoping to clear some of their (suspected) caches this doesn't change.

That suggests to me that this (I assume permanent) loss of disk space has some cause not directly related to using any of the Affinity apps.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

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.

To the best of my recollection, for years it never decreased on any of my Macs until I rebooted the system, & it sometimes could exceed 1 GB until I did that. But since you mentioned this, I started paying more attention to that number & I also have seen a (very slight but real) decrease on my iMac, now running Mojave on an APFS formatted startup disk.

I don't know if the change to APSF had anything to do with it, & I will have to monitor the Swap Used number in Activity Monitor for a few days to see if there is any pattern to it, but so far it is remaining relatively constant at around 111 to 114 MB, considerably less than what I often saw when my startup disk was formatted as HFS+.

[thomaso]

23 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Quote

Even after quitting the apps and hoping to clear some of their (suspected) caches this doesn't change.

That suggests to me that this (I assume permanent) loss of disk space has some cause not directly related to using any of the Affinity apps.

I notice at least in 1 very Affinity affine folder some left overs of temp files even after the app got closed:

~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher/temp/

Just take a look a few times into this folder, when working with + when closing + after closing the app. This afternoon for instance I had 5 files in this folder, (with only 1 document opened), then I closed the app and could see 1 file disappear, 4 files were left. Now, some hours later and again with launched app, there is only 1 file in this folder but it still remains after I closed the app now.

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

I notice at least in 1 very Affinity affine folder some left overs of temp files even after the app got closed:

~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher/temp/

Just take a look a few times into this folder, when working with + when closing + after closing the app. This afternoon for instance I had 5 files in this folder, (with only 1 document opened), then I closed the app and could see 1 file disappear, 4 files were left. Now, some hours later and again with launched app, there is only 1 file in this folder but it still remains after I closed the app now.

Although I have not tested this extensively, I do not see that behavior on my Mac. Even with several .afpub documents open in Publisher, the only file in that folder was a single one that was promptly deleted when I quit the app.

I will try to keep an eye on it for the next day or two & post back if anything changes.

[thomaso]

8 hours ago, R C-R said:

I will try to keep an eye on it

Maybe it's not worth unless you run into issues.

To me the dates and data in this folder don't seem to show updated or true info, for instance right now:
– I work in APub in only 1 .afpub (12,5 MB)  today at ~ 11:40 h but there is no file with even a similar date, the personas.dat excepted (I haven't used StudioLink)
– There still is an autosave file from 19 April. (I assume autosave would exist only for currently open documents)
– The current autosave file name and its modification date differ by ~ 3 hours.

(Note above the confusing file sum of the folder autosave. This is a known/reported macOS issue in particular on APFS formatted volumes.)

– I could suspect a crash causing the older autosave file to be forgotten but the last crash was 9 hours before this autosave file.
– The folder CrashReports appears to have had last actions in February/March. (> before 1.8.3)

 

It's also interesting (different than expected) that the user/Library/Cache folder shows much less file size than those above. Currently it says 1,5 MB only, all in fsCachedData with 9 files and very current dates/times.
~/Library/Caches/com.seriflabs.affinitypublisher

So I think the data presented in these folders aren't valuable for me user. But I could use them for instance in case of missing disk space and delete 'forgotten' temp + autosave files, @Lorox.

[Lorox]

Sorry if I recently haven't quite kept up with new posts here. Having read all your friendly contributions by now, it seems to me that the behaviour I observed and made me start this topic is actually most likely an issue of how macOS handles temporary storage of data used by the apps. I don't really think by now any more that it is linked predominantly to the Affinity apps the use of which triggered my observations, nevertheless.

Obviously the apps themselves DO use/need their respective disk space of about 1.7 GB on machines other than mine as well. Having been along when state of the art (at that time) graphic design apps used to be installed from a small number of 1.4 MB(!) floppy disks I wasn't really prepared to see a size of 1.7 GB as something not really out of the normal. My latest version of InDesign (10 years old...) takes only about 400 MB on disk. (I just noticed, however, that Acrobat 9 Pro, which is an old app, too, uses about 1 GB of disk space and has most likely done so for all those years! )

I also learned something about Time Machine that I didn't know before ("local snapshots"), even though I had been using it for about 10 years... Thanks for that!

Anyway, I'll keep an eye on the issue, nevertheless and maybe come back to it later, if I encounter something that possibly deserves clearing or discussing. Meanwhile I've (mostly) shifted all Affinity apps work to my other, faster and newer iMac, where there's more available disk space, anyway.

It's nice though to have that fallback option to the older machine with the Affinity apps as moderately older versions of macOS are still being supported – I highly appreciate that! When you have a system that's running smoothly (and is still safe enough) in general I find it extremely annyoing when you're sort of forced to have an OS update just because an update of some your main apps suddenly won't run anymore (or start being unreliable) on your favoured system. Eventually that's inevitable at some time – I know – but especially Adobe generally didn't care very much about backwards compatability. So it's good to see Affinity hasn't been so demanding in that respect so far...

[A2 GGX]

Hi, I have a question related to this.  I use Affinity 2 with Topaz plug-ins on Windows 10. 

I have 56GB free space on my c drive when Affinity Photo is closed. 

while working on photos this is used up and I get a warning sign that I only have 1GB.

I am not very technically minded, so please explain in layman's terms how I can resolve this.  

[Lorox]

4 hours ago, A2 GGX said:

I have 56GB free space on my c drive when Affinity Photo is closed. 

while working on photos this is used up and I get a warning sign that I only have 1GB.

Maybe someone knows a bit about memory management on Windows? Can there really be that much usage of disc space – even if RAM is possibly a bit low?

When I originally opened this topic the amount of disc space used on my Mac by Affinity apps was actually very much less than what is reported here (although it seemed to be enough to be suspicious then...)