APub: Persona Disk usage risen above warning limit

[Andrew Simpson]

The full message says "Persona disk usage has risen above the warning limit - consider closing some documents". Does anybody know what this is talking about and how to fix it? Only have AP open, just one document...about 50 Megs in size, almost all text. I can no longer save changes in this document – it just shows "saving document" keeps displaying if for about 5 minutes, then this error pops up.Have tried in APhoto and ADesigner with same result. Only this document affected. Program doesn't hang completely - I can open up another document, work on it, and save it, though it's a bit kludgy.   CPU fans go nuts, but activity monitor doesn't say the machine is that busy. It is occupying most of the 16 Gigs of Ram, and paging to SSD disk to some degree.  Mac OS 10.14.6

[Wosven]

I had sort of similar messages on WIndows about Apub: and the memory usage was high. APub, AD and AP where idle — only APub had documents opened, and I was working in ID while Firefow & Thunderbird take also lot of memory.

At least this time the system was able to give warnings. Long before this, once the PC was so slugish and lagging after APub was open for a long time that I had to  do a hard shut down since it wasn't able to react and shut down normally.

Were you working for long on this document?

[carl123]

5 hours ago, Andrew Simpson said:

The full message says "Persona disk usage has risen above the warning limit - consider closing some documents".

There is a "Disk Usage Warning" setting in Edit > Preferences > Performance.

You may want to try increasing that if you have the disk space available

or just max it out and see what happens.

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, And

7 hours ago, Andrew Simpson said:

Only have AP open, (...) Have tried in APhoto and ADesigner with same result.

"AP" ? – or APub? – How did the text come into the file (copy/paste or placed) and what file format did it come from?

rew Simpson said:

one document...about 50 Megs in size, almost all text.

Have you tried closing/relaunching APhoto? – Maybe a corrupted document?

Your file size sounds odd to me if its text mainly: I just created an .aphoto, placed a .txt with 270.000 chars, 1 layer, 1 text style –> the saved .aphoto has 2,3 MB on disk.
In Activity Monitor neither unusual CPU nor RAM usage, even if spelling is activated with all words marked, 1,2 GB RAM for APhoto, no used Swap.

I do get the macOS beach ball for some seconds when e.g. changing text color. I would not expect APhoto to handle text as effective (fast) as the Affinity vector apps AD and APub do.

[Andrew Simpson]

In answer to questions:

1. Affinity Publisher. But open the file in Af. Photo, or Af Design, same problem. Have tried reopening, rebooting...and different document. It's this document, and it's the size which is giving the system problems.

2. Text was placed by copy & paste from PDF text.

3. The problem appears to be file size. I have 54 links to an 18 Meg PDF file (the same PDF file for all of them), but a different page shown for each link. These are referenced, not embedded.  And yet.....

I found that cutting out just three of these references cleared up my problem.   I have also implemented carl123 suggestion - I was looking for something like that, remembered it, but couldn't find. (ie. didn't look hard enough!) Thank you for that.

The file size looks huge to me as well. I picked up a previous project (13 Megs...all text....still large to my mind, but...well...) and simply deleted the content. I'm wondering if by chance the content isn't really deleted, just hidden, the additional material built on that, and if at least one copy of the PDF is actually being embedded. Still, even 53 Megs, isn't a lot.

Thank you all for your time, observations, and suggestions. I very much appreciate them.

[thomaso]

9 minutes ago, Andrew Simpson said:

2. Text was placed by copy & paste from PDF text.

I'd rather try not to copy/paste from a PDF but as pure text instead. For instance save/export or copy/paste from PDF to a simple text editor app –> then copy/paste from there into Affinity.

Alternatively you could try this slim, free app, a PDF viewer with additional text viewer, which might enable you to copy all text as 1 string:
https://eclecticlight.co/2019/02/12/pdf-without-adobe-1-at-the-heart-of-macos/

19 minutes ago, Andrew Simpson said:

3. The problem appears to be file size. I have 54 links to an 18 Meg PDF file (the same PDF file for all of them), but a different page shown for each link. These are referenced, not embedded.  

Sorry, I don't understand this, in particular how it influences the Affinity file size. If these 54 are hyperlinks within the text in Affinity then the size of their linked aim (18 MB PDF) would not matter. Or is this PDF itself a containing part in your Affinity document? If yes, in which way? – However, just the size of an 18 MB file inside an Affinity document hardly is the reason for your issues. I assume something else is going on, maybe caused by this PDF?

[Andrew Simpson]

Thomaso:

1.You're right. I do have a text file (it's from an OCR scan), but it was easier (lazier) to copy and paste from a PDF, which was more readable; easier to see what I was doing.

2. I don't  understand why a linked PDF document affects file size. But it appears so.

3. Since I kept running into problems, I copied all the text into a fresh file, and now have a file of 17 Megs before adding in the PDF. The starter file I had used before originally had 13 Megs, and, I recall this the case in this and other programs, that file size never goes away even if you empty out the contents. Adding the PDF, even linked, appears to add in the whole thing. I will crack the PDF into individual PDFS, add them one at a time, and watch the file size. If it grows proportionately, then there's something wrong with the linking/embedding. The Resource Manager reports them as linked.

Still I'd think a 50-60 meg file would hardly jam up a system - 16 Gigs RAM and a 2T SSD. Okay, it's an 8 year old MacBook Pro, but memory is memory.

Thank you very much for your observations, comments, AND the web link.

[thomaso]

9 hours ago, Andrew Simpson said:

2. I don't  understand why a linked PDF document affects file size. But it appears so.

I agree. That is why I would focus on this details: What exactly does the input (OCR text and/or PDF with links) contain that may cause extraordinary work for Affinity? Can alternative sources or ways (open/place/paste) of the input influence the conflicts?

I am still not sure about the content: Are there 2 PDFs involved? – There seems to be a PDF which contains OCR text. This is the PDF you copy/paste from. – And there is another PDF which contains 54 links and which is 18 MB in size. – And the Affinity file contains mainly text only (no images, no image previews). – Correct?

Could you upload the involved PDFs to take a look?

9 hours ago, Andrew Simpson said:

file size never goes away even if you empty out the contents.

You can get rid of unnecessary data within a document if you do a "Save as...". You can either use the same name and replace the existing or use a new name. In both ways the file size may shrink.

9 hours ago, Andrew Simpson said:

Still I'd think a 50-60 meg file would hardly jam up a system - 16 Gigs RAM and a 2T SSD. Okay, it's an 8 year old MacBook Pro, but memory is memory.

I agree, the hardware equipment is sufficient, even if your mac might have max. 2 CPU kernels and therefore may speed up the fan to cool down, the computer will be able to handle this tasks.

I assume it is not the file size which causes problems – rather is the problem that the file size is caused at all without obvious reason. That appears to make Affinity work so hard.

[carl123]

6 minutes ago, thomaso said:

You can get rid of unnecessary data within a document if you do a "Save as...". You can either use the same name and replace the existing or use a new name. In both ways the file size may shrink.

Using the same name in a "Save as..." in order to reduce the file size has never worked for me.

It always has to be to a new name, which is irritating at times

[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Using the same name in a "Save as..." in order to reduce the file size has never worked for me.

It always has to be to a new name, which is irritating at times

Because I am working in Separate Mode which still (since pre-retail beta) has a known bug causing a crash when using "Save as..." with the same name, I can't do it with same name.

But you remind me to a recent (~1 months) post of a Serif member who wrote an Affinity document would automatically reduce file size in two situations: a.) if the unnecessary data grow above 25% of file size and b.) after a certain number of steps done in the file. – Maybe this is kind of an improvement, new in v183?