Affinity Photo excess memory use?

[Sofa Gas Rue]

Issue/situation:
After updating to Affinity Photo version 1.8.6 I frequently run into the issue of my system running out of memory.
This only occurs with Affinity Photo and the past two times I've only had one document open at a time ( the document was a 1.6GB Affinity file original of a Phocus Tiff time ). The only way I can get around it is by closing Affinity photo and then reopen to resume - this seems to clear how much Affinity Photo stores in memory.  

Here's the specs for my computer:
Mac Pro (Late 2013)
Processor 3,5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
Memory 16 GB 1866 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD FirePro D700 6 GB

Question:
Is this just me or does anyone else have this issue?

Screenshots:
See attached screenshot.

Operating system:
OSX Catalina 10.15.6

Affinity Photo:
Version 1.8.6

Unusual hardware:
Wacom tablet Intuos pro

Any help or input on this matter is much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

PS: if this post is in the wrong forum, then please let me know, and I will submit it in another.

[Callum]

Hi Sofa gas rue,

Welcome to the forums

Please could you tell me if this happens when you create a new file and work on that or does this only happen with one file?

Thanks

C

[Sofa Gas Rue]

Hi @Callum

I've not experienced it with a document created 'from scratch' through Affinity Photo, but it has occured with different files ( originating from .tiffs ). Common to them all is they were created through Hasselblad Phocus but opening them in photoshop does not create such memory hogging.

link to Hasselblad phocus: https://www.hasselblad.com/phocus/

Let me know if that helped.

Best,
Sofus 

Edited December 1, 2020 by Sofa Gas Rue
added link.

[Sofa Gas Rue]

Hi @Callum

Just a quick update - yesterday and today I've been working on a set of .CR2 files ( canon raw ). In total 20 images each around 35 - 40 MB - after editing 15 of them I could see Affinity Photo took up 20 GB of system memory.

I'm really curious if this is common or if I am doing something wrong, any input would greatly be appreciated?

All the best and thank you in advance

Sofus 

[carl123]

In Edit > Preferences > Performance try reducing the "RAM Usage Limit" to around about 10GB and see if that gets rid of the error message popping up.

You will probably encounter more swapping to disk etc but hopefully other applications will have enough memory for their needs and thus you don't get the error message any more.

 

PS Not really sure why Macs give that message, I think Windows would only do so if you ran out of both memory and the swap file was full

Maybe a Mac guru will come along later to explain what is really happening

[Sofa Gas Rue]

HI @carl123

Thank for the quick reply, I will give the ram usage limit a go and see if that helps  Though I don't think it will have the desired effect.
It's my understanding this issue occurs when an application does not 'release' the unused memory associated with documents no longer in use, and from what I gather that is in effect a 'virtual memory leak'.

Here is a breakdown of how I understand it:

1 - Open a document in Affinity Photo for editing
2 - Affinity Photo holds the document and associated edits in memory ( ram, swapfile or regular files on disk ) 
3 - Once the document is closed, Affinity Photo should release all associated data in memory for that document to free up space BUT does not and for each document the memory requirements ( ram, swapfile or regular files on disk ) just keeps piling up.

The only way to 'release' the space used by Affinity Photo is to close the whole application and thereby releasing all the memory used by the application.
I've tried testing it with both Adobe Photoshop and Hasselblad Phocus and I can see the memory footprint drops after each document is closed, which makes me think they manage the required memory 'better' or in a different way. 

Please note I am by no means a developer nor do I claim to know the ins and outs of the issue but I would think Affinity Photo has an issue with memory management ( virtual memory leak ?).

@Callum Do you or do you know who I can ask if the way Affinity Photo handles this is by design or something that could change in future updates?

Again I really appreciate everyone's input, I know it's not a sexy topic but I would dearly like to get ot the bottom if this so I don't have to shut the application after every fifth document edit..  

 

[Sofa Gas Rue]

 

It seems no one else is having issues with Affinity Photo using excessive disk usage ( I'm assuming because it does not clear it's cashes or such ) but in short I've stopped using Affinity Photos as my go-to editor for commercial work and back to Adobe Photoshop as there are no issues there.

See attached screenshots from yesterdays / today's work with only a couple of tiff documents processed.