Publisher running increasingly slowly

[Jivix]

Hi all, first time here. I need some support assistance. I'd love to know what's going on with my issue.

I have used Publisher several times to create documents for a project I'm working (currently using v703 on Win10 20H2) , but it appears to be behaving oddly now. The only significant change I have made since I last used Publisher was replacing my graphics card (nvidia 1070 upgraded to 3070), and updated the graphics driver (461.09). I have monitored my cpu (ryzen 5 3600) and gpu load, and neither are going above 20% under any conditions, but Publisher is becoming extremely sluggish. It's possible this is unrelated as I did not use Publisher for that many projects preceding this.

Publisher is taking 1800 MB of memory after having it open for 2-3 hours. Just having a simple 4 page spread with a text frame on each page (no heavy graphics - just a couple pages of text) and clicking in and out of frames can take over 5 seconds and causes the UI to update multiple times. The issue quickly re-occurs if the application is closed and reopened, whether or not the document is new or an existing document.

To be extra clear, I don't have any issues with typing or editing within a single frame, but working with multiple frames gets to be unacceptably slow, by a huge margin. Sometimes it takes 1/10th of a second to click out, other times up to 3-5 seconds. And clicking into a frame has the same kind of random disparity, but is much faster (like 1/20th of a second to 1/2 a second, but still noticeable and enough to cause mis-clicks). I noticed these UI changes cause my CPU and GPU usage to spike to 10-20% during that time, and the memory usage rapidly changes multiple times as well.

It also gets progressively worse the more times I click in and out of the frames. I noticed the memory usage also rapidly climbs while doing this. Just clicking in and out a few dozen times (representing about 3-5 minutes of work for me), the app is already taking over 700MB just to display one spread.

But here's the weird thing, sometimes it just doesn't happen. I have no idea what's causing this behavior to start or stop, but it happens during a single session.

Help! I just want to get a simple project out of the way and this is totally infuriating. I would rather not have to work not knowing if my input is causing it to get slower with every click.

Edited January 30, 2021 by Jivix

[Jivix]

After examining my event viewer history, I saw some errors related to graphics (nvlddmkm event id 14 error), and apparently there's some instabilities in the graphics drivers for new cards, that others are having issues with as well.

It's odd that I have been using over a dozen different apps and the problem is only visible in Publisher, but that's a natural result of the complexity of computer software I guess.

Edited January 31, 2021 by Jivix
elaboration

[CaptainAHAB10111]

I am having similar issues, screen flickering,  sporadic CPU hi draw.    I have a fairly high end PC as well (8700k 6 core 4.7 GHZ and a 3080 RTX).

[Gabe]

Hi @Jivix,

Welcome to the forums and sorry for the delayed reply. 

I was about to mention your GPU drivers. Is there a version you can roll back to? 

[Jivix]

Thanks for stopping by!

Well, there is, but I decided to jump forward to driver 461.40 as there were claims and reports that it is more stable. So far, I haven't noticed a significant slowdown, but I also haven't used Publisher for a 6-hour stretch since.

I guess the garbage collector wasn't working properly on the older driver for whatever reason. The issue persisted through system reboots so I'm only theorizing that was the case. So far, I haven't gotten the memory to rise beyond 900MB even with significant content changes in the document.

Not sure if there is a place to report bad driver interactions - 461.09 was definitely a problem child for the Affinity suite.

Edited February 3, 2021 by Jivix
politeness

[Jivix]

Updated to 1.9, memory usage steadily rising again. Have no idea what's going on.

[SaltyClownShoes]

the program always seems to crash for me around 6-8 Gigs of memory usage.  Sadly, it's not stable enough for my large projects.  I have to save like a madman as always... still gonna sit on my old BETA version.  It better 1.9.0.874 (IIRC). 

[Gabe]

We are aware of some issue with the 1.9 public release. I'll pass your signature specs on!

[Jivix]

6 hours ago, Gabe said:

I'll pass your signature specs on!

Sorry, this isn't really relevant to this thread, but how do you add a signature to your posts? I don't see an option in the post or in my account.

[AJD]

after installing the 1.9 update, i have a problem with the program working extremely slow.... trying  to move items like text boxes, images etc... they move extremly slow and are way behind my select tool...i try dragging something and it does not move with select tool until a few seconds behind...??? i hope you can figure out what i am trying to say in my description here...

[thierry savoie]

i have same problem, i'm back to beta and it's ok

the problem appears between 1.9.420 and 1.9.432

[Gabe]

16 hours ago, Jivix said:

Sorry, this isn't really relevant to this thread, but how do you add a signature to your posts? I don't see an option in the post or in my account.

You can do it following this link: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

For everything saying Pub is slow in 1.9, please see my reply here: 

 

[Jivix]

Unfortunately, closing the paragraph panel did not solve my issue (but it did provide a UI speed boost). The app still gets progressively slower the more it is used, after about an hour it gets to the point where doing anything takes multiple seconds. Saving the document and restarting the application makes the slowdown go away, and that's my temporary fix until a new version comes out.