Issue linking 500+ images in one document and memory usage for book project

[EpicBlob]

Hey all,

I'm currently preparing on working on a school book project and want to use the Affinity suite to make it. The team I'm working with want to make the entire process within Affinity publisher, so all the layout, artwork, and publishing is done within affinity publisher. The goal / thinking is to have a single unit as a Publisher file, then create a master document that merges all unit files into one large file (roughly 100 pages per book, and 500 linked artwork in one document)

I was having problems yesterday trying to merge everything together. I got to about 8 units worth of content merged into one file, then received the error "Failed to open file, the file could not be opened because there are too many files open in the system". On top of this, the file which was roughly 350mb was taking up 14gb of memory.

I did some digging into the problem and came across a forum post people had similar issues, with one person linking the issue with Windows Affinity keeping linked files open and bogging up performance while in OS X linked files weren't open and system resources remained free. I have an OS X machine I could test this on, but will need to figure out a way to get it working on my Windows machine (working with another person on this project and they don't have OS X.

I've tried altering the memory used within the preferences panel (16gb, 8gb, 4gb, all didn't help the issue), restarting my PC and just having publisher running, cleaning up the file so that 95% of the artwork was linked and not embedded, but nothing seems to help.

Sorry if this explanation is kinda all over the place, here's what I'm hoping to accomplish with Affinity with this project:
-link multiple afpublisher files together as one large file.
-have artwork inside of an afpublisher file that can be edited within the document without having to go to the art file, update it, export it, then import it back to the afpublisher file.
-have one document that has 400-600 linked afphoto files inside.

System Specs:
Windows 10
Affinity Publisher 1.8.3.641
AMD Ryzen 2600 CPU
GTX 1070 GPU
16gb DDR4 3000mhz
1TB m2 ssd

Hopefully I was able to articulate the issues I'm facing haha, very new to the program so any tips or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[thomaso]

Hi EpicBlob,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

This is rather an "any tip or suggestion" than a reasonable solution but might be worth a try as a temporary workaround: Decrease temporarily the master .afpub's document resolution.

I noticed with an opened .afpub of 40 MB, (100 pages, 70 linked JPGs + various vector graphics + effects), a reduction of APub's current RAM usage:
300 dpi: ~ 6 GB
72 dpi:   ~ 2 GB
When changing the document DPI, regardless of reducing or increasing, APub appears for some minutes to demand more, additional RAM. I assume it calculates new preview data additional to the currently existing. So I saved the file, quit APub, relaunched and reopened the .afpub, to interrupt this additional re-calculation and use of RAM.

This was on mac, the RAM usage was read from the Activity Monitor app. When opening the .afpub its use of RAM toggles for some minutes within a range up to about 250% of the "final" RAM usage. (I assume it calms down when it finished loading + preparing previews for all objects).

The linked resources maintain their placed DPI and don't appear different in either documents resolution. At the time of reduced document DPI I would not use the Rasterize command within this document. If you open + edit a linked resource inside the parent .afpub the linked file opens with its own document resolution, so it is not affected from a reduced DPI of this parent/master .afpub.

I haven't tried exports yet from such a low-res .afpub into a high-res PDF. I assume since the export resolution gets set separately it also can be higher than the .afpub resolution and will show a result according to the resolution of the linked resources. But any required rasterisation during export (e.g. adjustments, effects, blend modes) might be affected from a document resolution lower than the export resolution (I haven't tried yet, either). That means as long you don't apply adjustments, effects or certain blend modes inside your master .afpub you might work with a reduced resolution all time and set a higher DPI for export only.

Another option to reduce RAM usage might be the document colour space. Since Affinity apps work natively in RGB, an APub document set to CMYK may require additional calculations (RAM) for proper display. This workaround would be useful only if there are no color space related operations within the .afpub, as e.g. certain blend modes, which produce different results depending on their color space.

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