Extremely Slow Load times

[coderman]

Affinity -

I'm running version 1.9 of both Designer and Photo, and they are STILL painfully slow to launch. I'm running a 2019 MacPro with 96GB ECC ram, 16 core Xeon and the 32GB Radeon Pro Vega II, with 2TB SSD. In other words, a very expensive and high-powered Mac Pro. Affinity software loads like a pile of rubbish. For the cost, I get that it's more economical than Adobe and it's good design software in general but the performance is not worth any savings in value. Sadly to say, regardless of any cost of entry, being at a version 1.9 and still loading like a bag of bricks shows extremely poor attention to detail and coding.

Will you guys actually fix this problem, or continue to pretend it doesn't exist?

[jmwellborn]

Welcome to the Forums @coderman.   I don’t have your high-powered Mac Pro but Photo v. 1.9 loads on my 2020 Macbook Pro (Big Sur, M1 chip) in about 1 second — consistently.  I haven’t yet updated Designer or Publisher, being temporarily busy with other things, but the v. 1.9 Betas for both also open consistently in less than a second.  Hardly a bag of bricks.  On my 2017 Mac (High Sierra) I am keeping v. 1.8.4 of each app.  They all open a bit more slowly but that is really my fault, having loaded them to the gills with Assets, Brushes, Palettes, Styles, etc.  Think it might be the old fable about the tortoise and the hare?🤔

[coderman]

Interesting it loads quickly on your M1 chip MacBook Pro. Specifically, I've had an issue spanning multiple revisions with completely stock installs of Affinity Photo and Designer. No additional fonts, plugins or otherwise and fresh installs.

Is your copy downloaded from the App Store, or standalone directly from Affinity? I wonder if that may be a difference, but regardless Affinity is quiet on this despite numerous complaints about performance issues. Part of their "1.9 release hype" was improved performance. Unfortunately, not so much.

I'm sure there's a reason Affinity is quiet about the issue

[coderman]

Update: it seems there's a load-speed issue when the app is purchased from the Apple App Store. I downloaded the trial, and it loads almost instantaneously. The first load, it took longer as the application was being verified by Apple servers; but upon every reboot and first load, it loads instantly.

It's something to do with Apple's verification process with these Affinity apps on load. I think Affinity needs to update their software, to run the licensing check after the UI loads for the application. That would solve all issues with load times. 

[wonderings]

10 minutes ago, coderman said:

Update: it seems there's a load-speed issue when the app is purchased from the Apple App Store. I downloaded the trial, and it loads almost instantaneously. The first load, it took longer as the application was being verified by Apple servers; but upon every reboot and first load, it loads instantly.

It's something to do with Apple's verification process with these Affinity apps on load. I think Affinity needs to update their software, to run the licensing check after the UI loads for the application. That would solve all issues with load times. 

Yes this has been noted and mentioned in many threads with people asking the same question. The search function does wonders!

That being said if it was just a slow load up time but it is running fast when using then I would not be all that upset as the real important stuff is using the app not booting it up. Yes it is slow but it could be worse! Hopefully there will be a fix soon, think it needs to come from Apple though, not sure if Serif has anything to do on their end with this issue. Out of curiosity what kind of work do you do with that beast of a setup?

[coderman]

I did do a search, but purposely wanted to bump a new thread in hopes it would gain attention again. I wasn't aware though that the cause had been identified. It would be fixed by moving the verification process after the initial UI loads however, though I'm not sure if that's possible with App Store submitted MacOS apps. Could be right in that case, it's an Apple thing - though these Affinity apps are the only ones purchased from the App Store that have this poor loading speed on initial load.

To me, it's annoying enough to warrant moving to something else as it's been a lingering issue and speaks to some degree to the quality of the software and/or update cycle in general. However, since the software is on sale I've now purchased a copy of both Photo and Designer directly vs the App Store. Solved the issue now, loads instantly.

Re: the system specs ... I'm running dual XDR displays with the system as well, definitely a beast. Beautifully designed system. I'm a hardware and software engineer / developer; developed software that interconnects with custom developed hardware for NHL training centers etc. as well as many other integrated systems like shipping & tracking etc. I don't often max out the system at all, but it's there should I need it and it runs dead silent, and pushes these two 6K Apple XDR displays plus all of my attached external storage and other hardware I develop for / with, with ease  

[DawnM]

I just updated my Affinity Apps to the 1.9 from the previous version. I did not use the Apple App store. I opened a 21.7 MB document that I had just finished in the previous version of Affinity Publisher and I thought it was never going to open at all. It took 11 minutes for the file to open. I did not have this problem with the previous version of Publisher.

I too would like to know if this is a bug in the update.

I have a 17 inch Macbook Pro with OS El Capitan with 8GB of memory.

[Dan C]

Hi @coderman & @DawnM,

I can confirm that as noted above, this is a known issue with the latest version of Affinity and Big Sur (with some users on Catalina also experiencing this).

Please see my below post for more information here - 

_______________________________________________________________________________________

On 2/12/2021 at 6:29 PM, DawnM said:

I opened a 21.7 MB document that I had just finished in the previous version of Affinity Publisher and I thought it was never going to open at all. It took 11 minutes for the file to open (...)

I have a 17 inch Macbook Pro with OS El Capitan with 8GB of memory.

This certainly doesn't sound correct, however it's different from the original issue raised in this thread. Could you please create a new post in the bugs section of our forums, and upload a copy of the file that took this long to open - so our team can investigate this further?

Many thanks in advance

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/81-publisher-bugs-found-on-macos/

[Venyer]

It looks there are lots of problems with the 1.9 update. Have you tried the last beta? Let's hope they release 1.9.1 stable soon and we can work with the programs they we should.

[RedRetek]

I have the same problem.

I have a Mac Mini 2018, 6 core i7, 32GB RAM, MacOS 11.2.1, plenty of free space on the SSD, Affinity Photo 1.9 and Designer 1.9 from serif.com but I had this problem with the 1.8.6 on MacOS 10.15 as well. No plugins, no extra fonts, just a clean install.

The first start is super slow, after that if I quit the programs and reopen them again, it only takes 2 seconds.

 

[Paros]

I have had the same problem for some time. It is really awful. 

But there doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem.

[Dan C]

Hi @RedRetek & @Paros,

Welcome to the Affinity forums

On 2/14/2021 at 12:40 PM, Dan C said:

I can confirm that as noted above, this is a known issue with the latest version of Affinity and Big Sur (with some users on Catalina also experiencing this).

Please see my below post for more information here - 

[Roberto S.]

I'm using Affinity Photo & Designer 1.9.3 on a Macbook Pro Intel 2019 with Catalina 10.15.7 and although it's better than version 1.9.0 it's still slower than 1.8.X