Designer Performance Question

[lb Cake]

I have a document that is 57,000 KB, I've noticed that since the document eclipsed 15,000 KB roughly three weeks ago, there's been a considerable increase in the amount of time it takes Designer load the desired document and its variants. The document in question contains thousands of objects, most of which are just rectangles, so I'm wondering if the delay is normal above a certain file size threshold. 

For reference the 57,000 KB file takes just shy of 19 minutes to open. An earlier version of the file took just over 9 minutes to open at a size of 16,000 KB. For comparison an even earlier version of the same file opened instantly at 12,000 KB. Because of a lag issue I have been working with Open CL Hardware Acceleration disabled for a few few weeks now.  I've also played around with the snapping based on recommendations to other users in the support forums but have not observed any change in performance pertaining to document loading. Additionally Task Manager isn't showing anything out of the ordinary while the document is loading, neither the CPU nor Memory usage are spiking at any point in the launch cycle (prior to, during, or after). 

Hopefully someone can illuminate the situation for me.

[Gear maker]

@lb Cake I've done some pretty good sized drawings and have had nothing near the 9 minutes to load.  Are all the objects vectors or are there a lot of pixel layers?  What typically are the objects like in your drawing?  Do you use a lot of fx on most layers?  Adjustment layers?  How much ram do you have in your system?  Are you working from an SSD or HD?  How much open drive space do you have?

[lb Cake]

2 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

@lb Cake I've done some pretty good sized drawings and have had nothing near the 9 minutes to load.  Are all the objects vectors or are there a lot of pixel layers?  What typically are the objects like in your drawing?  Do you use a lot of fx on most layers?  Adjustment layers?  How much ram do you have in your system?  Are you working from an SSD or HD?  How much open drive space do you have?

Thanks for the questions and feedback Gearmaker.

All three of the documents are composed primarily of vector objects with some pixel work, the smallest document has the highest amount of pixel work. A small percentage of objects (10% or so) have overlay effects on them and there are about 10 or so gradients of varying size. I don't have any adjustment layers. I have 16 GB of RAM. As far as my HD I don't have a SSD (yet), my C Drive has 794 GB of free space, my F Drive where I store my work has 712 GB free.

[Gear maker]

Wow, I see nothing that would lead me to figure such a large huge loading time.  If it takes that long to load are you having huge redraw times when you zoom a bit into a drawing?  That usually gets out of hand long before noticeable loading times for me.  What OS, I'm assuming you are using Windows?

[lb Cake]

I'm not sure what constitutes "huge" but do experience redraw when zooming in or out. I don't recall having any issues with redraw on the smaller documents and yes I'm using Win 10 Pro.

[Gear maker]

@lb Cake I took a drawing of mine that has 5000 layers, some simple and many complex.  Many with some fx and gradients.  No pixel layers, vector only.  File size (following a Save as) is 805KB.  I opened the current AD beta, then timed how long it took to open the drawing. 3 seconds.  I took a version that had some pixel layers 93.9MB (following a Save as) included, between 3 and 4 seconds. 

I did the test again with a AD vector only drawing of mine with 39,000 layers, no pixel or gradient or fx.  Mostly simple shapes, a relatively few complex.  A virgin copy of the beta was already open. This file was 12.7MB file size (following a Save as).  7 seconds.  My computer is 13 years old (from 2009) with 12GB ram.  That's why I am amazed in your getting load times greater than a minute.  

Just to try it I included the time to load the beta AD and then open the 39,000 layers and it was only 16 seconds.  There has been some discussion in the forum concerning the loading time for AD the first time each day, so the result of this test may vary considerably. 

What else do you have open?  I used QuickTime Player (I use a mac) to record the opening time and it slowed the loading of the 39,000 layers from 7 seconds to 17 seconds.

[lb Cake]

@Gear maker the envy is real haha. My load times are oblivious to Beta or Production, nor does it matter whether Affinity is open or not. My typical workflow is to boot the PC (which is barely a year old) and open the document from Windows Explorer which is the only program open.  This morning was no different. Occasionally I will boot directly from Affinity with nothing else open but the load times are obscene regardless. 

Would you happen to know how Designer handles open shapes? Perhaps there's one (thousand) open shapes its struggling with?

I'm running a Ryzen 7 2700X with a  Radeon RX580.

[Gear maker]

@lb Cake I really don't think the issue of open or closed paths/shapes is an issue.  In the second test file I used at least half are open curves.  The first test file was almost all closed.  Would it be possible to do some experimenting on your file?  Making a copy first!!!!!!!  Then delete say half the layers and Save as to another name, then see how it loads.  Then try it again with the other half to see if it loads better.  Maybe you can narrow it down to a section that is causing it to hang.  And finally to a few layers.  I'd love to hear what you find.

Being 57MB I won't ask you to send it to me for me to try it on my system.  But I think that would be really interesting.  Sorry I'm out of ideas.  Unless it's something that's Windows only...  And I haven't read about such long load times in the forum before.  Good luck on your searching.  Let me know if I can help further.

[lb Cake]

4 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

@lb Cake I really don't think the issue of open or closed paths/shapes is an issue.  In the second test file I used at least half are open curves.  The first test file was almost all closed.  Would it be possible to do some experimenting on your file?  Making a copy first!!!!!!!  Then delete say half the layers and Save as to another name, then see how it loads.  Then try it again with the other half to see if it loads better.  Maybe you can narrow it down to a section that is causing it to hang.  And finally to a few layers.  I'd love to hear what you find.

Being 57MB I won't ask you to send it to me for me to try it on my system.  But I think that would be really interesting.  Sorry I'm out of ideas.  Unless it's something that's Windows only...  And I haven't read about such long load times in the forum before.  Good luck on your searching.  Let me know if I can help further.

@Gear maker thanks for all your help. There's no need to apologize it's a good suggestion and one I was planning to implement as well once I had time to do so. I'm going to try and do so tonight and hopefully I'll be able to report back over the weekend.

[lb Cake]

@Gear maker quick update I've been playing around with the composition adding pieces one by one to see what would slow down the loading and I noticed some CPU usage spiking. The file in the attachment is only 1,002 KB but as you can see it's pushing the CPU, a Ryzen 7 2700X to 84% CPU load whenever I zoom in. I'm a bit of a novice but I don't think that should be happening don't think that should be happening with a file of this size. I'm going to continue adding objects from the original file and see what effect it has on Designer's boot times.

Update: I should probably mention that this problem came to my attention because of YouTube buffering. On occasion I will play videos in a browser, usually Microsoft Edge. Today for the first time I had a video buffer and I traced the source back to Affinity.

Edited March 15, 2021 by lb Cake
Updated with additional information.

[Gear maker]

@lb Cake I have seen several reports of CPU spiking in some operations.  Can't say I have ever watched my activity monitor to see what it was doing.  Are you seeing loading times of a few seconds with a stripped down version of your file?

[lb Cake]

@Gear maker yes I am. I think the major problem may be a series of shapes using the Contour Tool. I'm going to continue transferring items while omitting those shapes to see what that does to my load times. I'll update the post with my findings.

[lb Cake]

@Gear maker could you lend me your input please. I have to graphic design software open, Affinity Designer and Corel Draw, there is no document open in Designer. The document open in Corel is 27,727 KB worth of objects exported from Designer, yet Designer is using more memory to display nothing, is that normal? Shouldn't Designer's memory usage be much smaller? Also does the RAM limit function work, I haven't been witness to any limitations in RAM usage?

[Gear maker]

@lb CakeSorry for the slow response, I've been doing some running around today.  First I'm using a mac, so the numbers could be totally unrelated to yours. Opening AD beta in Separated Mode I am showing 285.2MB ram being used.  Opening a new letter size document 349.0MB ram.  Stretching the document to cover the 27" monitor shows 429.0MB ram (the blank letter document is fit to screen).  Opening a large document 697.1MB.  Having 3 large documents open 1022MB.  My current project requires all 3 open and displayed at once. Okay I zoomed in one the main document and my usage went up to 1.07GB.   Zooming in on all 3 documents 1.12GB.  My RAM limit in preferences says I am limited to 12.288GB.  I have 12GB of ram in my computer.  I've never changed it.  This is the first time I've ever actually looked at the ram used.  I doubt that will help, but hope it does.

[lb Cake]

Thanks @Gear maker I appreciate all the effort you've put into this. By all appearances it looks like I've reached some sort of solution.

As I mentioned before the issue seemed to lie with a series of rounded rectangles (I had roughly 10,000) that were making use of the contour tool, once these objects were deleted the file size and memory usage fell substantially, although it was still quite high. I also dropped the RAM limit to its lowest position and saw an immediate boost to responsiveness, including redraw speeds, and a stabilization of memory usage. 

I imagine the higher memory usage is a Windows/AMD thing, alternatively its a good excuse to upgrade my desktop memory 😁. Thanks again @Gear maker I think we can call this one solved.