Extremely Slow Performance both Startup and In-Application

[jwilliamsen]

I've been an Affinity Designer user for a few years, but haven't been using it for the past couple of months (had other projects to work on) but today I fired up Affinity Designer 1.8.5.703 and it was staggeringly slow:

It took almost 40 seconds to launch the program, took over 20 seconds to create a new document, and every change - button press and menu choice - had about a two-second lag before it was "acknowledged."    This performance is dramatically worse than what I remember it being a few months ago.  I used to love how fast AD was to launch - even WITH the large number of fonts I have - but today was baffling.  I first tried a restart, then uninstalled AD, restarted, installed the latest again - but that didn't do fix it.  I tried downgrading to 1.8.2 (the oldest version I could find) and the performance issues were still there.  (As a side note, I've also noticed that Affinity Photo has become a lot more laggy in general - much slower than the original speed-over-PShop-performance that inspired me to purchase it.)

I do have more fonts installed than a "stock" Windows installation - about 100 more than the standard 345 fonts - but if you watch the startup, font loading seems to go pretty smoothly.

So, to see if this is machine-specific, I installed AD on a backup workstation (an older machine).  AD launches completely in <5 seconds.  New Document creation takes ~2 seconds.  No noticeable lag - everything is as fast and snappy as I remember it being.

• Release being used: 1.8.5.703
• Yes, I can reproduce it every time I launch the software - Here is a video that shows what's happening: 

 

• New documents ALL take about 20 seconds to create - every time.
• System:  Windows 10 Pro x64, i7-5960-X CPU (8 core running at 4.5GHZ), 64GB RAM, Geforce 2070 RTX +Geforce 980Ti, System drive is a 1TB M2 SSD.
• I haven't installed anything lately that I can think would be related.  I checked against the "conflicting software list" and don't use any of the listed software.  I don't use any kind of display management or font managements software.  I do have a second monitor and a tablet - but I had those before (when AD was running well) - and they haven't caused any issues that I'm aware of in any of the other apps I use.

Again, this behavior seems to be very recently introduced, and I'm NOT seeing this on an older system that I used for testing.  At this point, AD is basically unusable.

Is there by any chance a logging system that would shed more light on what's hanging up?

Any help would be greatly appreciated - Thanks.

[Mark Ingram]

Try closing the Assets panel, and doing the same test again. Let me know how you get on.

[jwilliamsen]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply.  I shut down the Asset Panel and docked the floating panels - and restarted.  Boot up was marginally faster - about 30 seconds (vs 40 seconds) to be fully started up.  The laggy menu problem was still present though, and performance in a relatively simple document was the same (slow, laggy)

FWIW:  On my secondary machine where I installed AD, the Asset panel is open by default - and performance is excellent. 

Is there any kind of a logging function that might point to what is taking so long for loading?  I'm guessing that whatever is causing the load to take so long is the same culprit that is causing lag in operation.

Do you think that a font might be causing this?  It doesn't seem likely since the fonts seem to process really quickly ....

Edited January 8, 2021 by jwilliamsen

[jwilliamsen]

OK - so after more (and more) troubleshooting, this seems to be related to Acronis True Image 2021 and their new "malware" protection.  Once I shut off ATI's protection, there was a significant speedup in AD - like 4X faster and the menu lag and new document delay is gone (at least the first document created is fast, any subsequent ones are kind of slow) - although AD is still kind of "hitchy" and has mini-hangs here and there.

I wonder what they're doing that interferes with AD?

I'm going to re-install and see if that fixes it ....

OK - I re-ran the installer and did a "repair" and that seems to have helped a bit more.  I also switched from my GPU acceleration to the WARP acceleration and that helped as well.  I'm still seeing mini-hangs with text manipulation (moving text boxes, changing fonts, etc) but launch times are down to ~6 seconds and new document are created almost instantly.  It's still not the snappy, fluid AD I remember, but it's way more usable.

Edited January 15, 2021 by jwilliamsen

[jjfeenix]

jwilliamsen:

I'm interested in what your troubleshooting discovers as all my Affinity programs (Designer, Photo & Publisher on Win10) slow to an unusable crawl, if I have the apps open for some time.

I generally have to shut all apps down and restart them to clear things up. Sometimes Publisher refuses to shut down nicely (Not Responding).

I just checked and my load time for Publisher is about 40 sec.

BTW, I use Avira Anti-Virus.

[jwilliamsen]

@jjfeenix  You might want to shut down your anti-virus to see if it's the cause of the slowdown - although upon closer examination, I'm seeing what looks like a pretty substantial memory leak behavior in AD.  My guess is that your slowdowns have something to do with that.  I'd recommend opening up Task Manager in windows and watching the memory use of the programs.

Although my start-up speeds have improved dramatically, I'm still seeing really "hitchy" performance in AD - and I'm on a beast of a system.

[Jack Humbert]

I've been noticing similar issues with large documents (lots of artboards) with a lot of delay/lag in switching in and out of text editing, and closing the Asset panel and switching to WARP instead of my GFX card seemed to help a lot.

[jwilliamsen]

It seems that the 1.9 update has fixed most of these issues.  I still see some lag when I choose a new tool, but once it 'catches up' performance is snappy.  I did try switching to the WARP engine to see if that would help, but it only made a small difference.

So, at this point, 1.9 seems to have fixed the problems I was seeing.  I just wish I knew what *exactly* was happening because I was seeing it on one machine, but not my backup machine (which is significantly older and has a two-generations back GPU).

Thanks for posting the suggestion, though.  Seems to be more help than we're getting from the developers ... which sucks because I do like Serif software.

[Guest]

I'm running 1.9.1 on macOS and these issues are back. I tried copy/pasting/deleting the executables from the Applications folder as had been mentioned previously but while they helped briefly, I'm back to seeing >30 second start-up time on first launch.

[Hellodesigners]

Hi everyone,

I'm also experiencing a similar problem. Affinity designer is slow even if i downloaded the last version. 

Did you find any working solution ?

Thank you

[alanj]

I'm seeing this now as well.  on MAC version 1.10.4.

Affinity designer is now incredibly laggy and clunky, even on small files.  Used to be silky smooth, but now it's hard to use.

[nimsaJ]

All Affinity apps are loading extremely slow (almost 3 minutes) on Windows 10 Pro (fresh installed and updated). This is on SSD, while I have another HDD drive with W10 where the same Affinity version runs normally on the same machine!!!!!!!! Everything is faster on SSD as expected ~ except Affinity apps!!!!!! Loading .afphoto files is also very slow.

Edited January 8, 2022 by nimsaJ
clarification

[nimsaJ]

On 1/8/2022 at 12:12 PM, nimsaJ said:

All Affinity apps are loading extremely slow (almost 3 minutes) on Windows 10 Pro (fresh installed and updated). This is on SSD, while I have another HDD drive with W10 where the same Affinity version runs normally on the same machine!!!!!!!! Everything is faster on SSD as expected ~ except Affinity apps!!!!!! Loading .afphoto files is also very slow.

I was wrong. It WAS NOT Affinity's fault. It was OS setting which made SSD run slow in some instances. After some settings change, all Affinity apps run like a charm.

Edited January 20, 2022 by nimsaJ

[carl123]

7 minutes ago, nimsaJ said:

It was OS setting which made SSD run slow in some instances.

What was the OS setting?

[nimsaJ]

13 hours ago, carl123 said:

What was the OS setting?

I disabled ULPS in Registry Editor ('EnableUlps' value of '1' changed to '0'). I believe this happens with older machines upgraded to SSD.

[Hellodesigners]

Hi,

 

anyone find a solution for the performance issue in windows ?

 

Thanks

[SteveR_UK]

I have been noticing performance/lagging  issues as well in a few projects .

If save the project, restart AD and load the project up again the lagging issues I experience seem to go

I use a Windows 10, NVidia 1080ti, 32gb ram Machine

[scatterbrain73]

I'm getting huge performance issues as well. It starts off fine, but once I start building my files it gets slower and slower as I accumulate objects. And It's not like I have a ton of high-res placed images, either. We're talking simple vector shapes and symbols (see example). If I start moving any of these objects around, picture an animation running at like 6 frames per second.