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Publisher Locks Up on Heavily Linked Document


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Publisher 1.9.2, macOS Big Sur

Have 61-page Publisher document made up of one, mostly two, linked Designer files per page. On opening the Publisher document, the pages in the Page Panel are blank until we manually scroll through the actual pages, where we can see the linked files. The Page Panel slowly redraws. On five occasions, though, Publisher locked up, becoming non-responsive. Quitting closes the window, but Publisher itself would not quit. Had to Force Quit.

Crash logs sent to Apple.

Another attempt, and both pages and Page Panel are mostly blank, sporadically showing linked files. Pages show pixelated versions as though files are missing, but check of Resource Manager shows that the status of every linked file is okay. Publisher finally locked up. Had to force quit.

It appears Publisher can't handle a large number of linked files.

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This problem appears to have gone away after a day, so not sure if it has to do with a new Publisher document "settling in," a hardware or system issue at the time, or maybe a separate task that was doing something else, like checking license with MAS that was having its own problem at the time.

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Not ½ hour after writing previous post, found system rebooting itself. Had Publisher running along with Apple Pages & Mail. When opened my Publisher document, the blank pages returned. Quitting caused Publisher to become non-responsive and had to be Force Quit…ed(?) Found two things odd…

1) If I scrolled down the pages on the Page Panel and double-clicked a page, the document did not jump to that location as expected. Didn't move at all. I could scroll through the actual document, but other than the first two pages, no other pages showed the linked Designer documents. Now the first two pages has only embedded PNG images and text frames, so maybe they're the issue.

2) And now I forgot the second thing.

Maybe I shouldn't've…. Actually, I remember.

2) I opened Mac's Activity Monitor and watched the RAM usage by Publisher and while it usually crawls up to approximate 1.9 Gb of RAM (on 32 Gb system), it was stuck at approx. 550 Mb. So Publisher appeared to not even be trying to load the linked Designer documents. Not sure if this is because it stopped trying, or it was stuck at the last thing it did, which would make more sense because of the lockup on attempting to quit.

Anyway, shouldn't've tempted fate with that last post.

ADDED: In the time it took to write this post, opened my Publisher document again and it opened fine, albeit with slow redraw of the thumbnails on the Pages Panel. Could use it to jump to pages as expected and eventually all the thumbnails appeared. This seems to be consistent: if it locks up, Force Quit out of Publisher and wait about five minutes, then it'll work.

Still love you, Affinity!

Or Serif.

Never sure what to call you.

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On 4/11/2021 at 5:51 AM, skmwrp said:

found system rebooting itself

This kind of sounds like a hardware issue, but if not, I would expect it to be something deeper than an app running in user space, even if it only happens when running Publisher.

On 4/11/2021 at 5:51 AM, skmwrp said:

Still love you, Affinity!

Or Serif.

Never sure what to call you.

Serif is the company; Affinity is their trio of apps.

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11 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

This kind of sounds like a hardware issue, but if not, I would expect it to be something deeper than an app running in user space, even if it only happens when running Publisher.

This would only make sense if my system ever rebooted on its own, which it never has.

As for the second part — if it only happens when Publisher is running, then, by definition, Publisher is the problem.

Publisher has some issues, clearly, and I'm aware of it. Just trying to give them any information that might help them track down the issues.

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14 hours ago, skmwrp said:

This would only make sense if my system ever rebooted on its own, which it never has.

As for the second part — if it only happens when Publisher is running, then, by definition, Publisher is the problem.

That is not necessarily true if Publisher accesses certain library calls that are not used by other software that you use frequently, such as certain GPU routines. Another example is bad sectors on your hard drive, which only affect the files that happen to be stored where the bad sectors are. A further scenario could be that certain components are beginning to fail under stress or heat, and Publisher (whether through normal use or through some issue of its own) could be stressing it in particular ways that normally your other apps are not doing. Those are just a couple of examples how certain hardware issues could only manifest when certain software is used even though it is not the fault of the software.

It is not necessarily hardware, but if it is software, then there is a problem at the system level. No matter how badly behaved Publisher or any other app may be, by design it should be impossible for apps in user space to cause the system to restart. That it does shows that something is wrong with the system, whether a particular bugginess in Big Sur or some issue in your own installation. Again, just because you are only seeing it when Publisher runs only shows that Publisher is invoking whatever mechanism that is having the problem.

All that is not to say that there is not a particular bug in Publisher that is contributing to the problem, but the system is supposed to do a better job of dealing with it than that. But that the issue is sporadic and apparently isolated to your own system does make it hard to track down.

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  • Staff

Hi both,

As Garret has already explained, our apps can't cause a system reboot. Worst case scenario, our app crashes in "user" level and that's it. If your system reboots/crashes, there's not much we can do I'm afraid. 

We can have a look at the slow/redraw issue though. Can you package the project up, zip it and upload it using this link? https://www.dropbox.com/request/r7h0MfaIRlbhNVZ5xDoQ

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24 minutes ago, Gabe said:

If your system reboots/crashes, there's not much we can do I'm afraid. 

We're not even worried about the crash. It was just another thing that happened and we want to provide all information we can. It's the redraw issue and the app locking up while updating links and getting stuck that we care about, as that happened more commonly. The reboot was just weird.

Since updating to 1.9.4, we haven't had the issue (knock on bits), so we'll hold off to see it returns. Also, for added luck, we did the whole "duplicate the app to fix permissions" thing, which I don't know if it's even a problem with Publisher, but superstitions are cheap & effective.

Problem with sending the file is a) it's proprietary, b) packaging it up would not recreate the elaborate file structure (The Designer files are scattered among folders within folders, many levels deep, as we were trying to keep things organized when we used Designer only. We started using Publisher as a means to see, print, and work on them all in one location, kind of like Adobe Lightroom, which, when it's working, it works pretty well.), and c) because there should always be a c).

Anyway, if it happens again, hopefully we'll be more aware of what's going on and be able to provide more information as well as come up with a test scenario.

More hopefully, it won't happen again.

Thanks!

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I'm experiencing a similar issue with publisher locking up with links. In my case a pdf link. I'm currently working doing a digital print layout for a book using 144 pages of pdf placed as link on publisher. it works fine on the first few pages but lags and starts to freeze when I reach 20 pages. Am I missing out something here that I need to do? I'm afraid publisher reads and loads the whole 144pages link for every page.

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10 minutes ago, Tnt10 said:

I'm experiencing a similar issue with publisher locking up with links. In my case a pdf link. I'm currently working doing a digital print layout for a book using 144 pages of pdf placed as link on publisher. it works fine on the first few pages but lags and starts to freeze when I reach 20 pages. Am I missing out something here that I need to do? I'm afraid publisher reads and loads the whole 144pages link for every page.

If you're using a Mac, we opened Activity Monitor and watched as Publisher ate up RAM. We could see what appeared to be a memory leak (opening a linked file for editing would not release the used RAM), but Publisher 1.9.4 apparently fixes some memory leak issue. Our problem might be unrelated to what they fixed, but it could've also been a knock-off effect.

Anyway, it should tell you pretty quickly if Publisher is opening all 144 pages for each link, as that would really use up memory.

Don't know how to do the same if you’re using Windows.

If you haven't updated to Publisher 1.9.4, do that. For us, it seems much more stable.

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I'm using Mac. I have feeling it is reading the whole 144 pages of link for every page. Imagine if I placed everything on publisher it would then load up 144 pages multiplied by every page I place it into. I didn't want to mention the other software I'm using but Indesign doesn't have this kind of issue whereas it only ready a specific pdf page for every file place on the artboard. I don't have any complains with publisher, I love it really I just hope I can settle this issue as I will be working with a lot of of these types of work.

I'm currently at version 1.9.3 at the moment and there is no update yet from serif available.

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So far, AP 1.9.3 is rock solid! \0/

UPDATE: The problem seems to have gone away with 1.9.3. Yes, there's a bit of lag (not enough to seem unreasonable) with updating the thumbnails when first opened after restart, but the pages themselves show the linked Designer files file. Haven't locked up, haven't crashed, and we're just slapping Fate across the face by writing this, but we take our chances.

Edited by skmwrp
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AP 1.9.3, MacOS 11.2.3.

Okay, the problem returned. AP was loading linked AD files, locked up, and had to Force Quit out of it. Happened three times in a row.

The only extra information I have is that we were trying something new with a text style (changing font size) on one of the linked documents when it struck us that we were altering the original files, so we quit out of AP, went onto our Time Machine backup, found the file we were altering in pre-altered state, and dropped it into the folder containing the altered copy, so we were back to original state. We were planning to archive the entire directory so we can have a backup of that state in case we decide the changes aren't working out.

Opened the AP file and it quit updating/displaying the linked files on the page where we had altered that one linked document. Double-clicking thumbnails didn't jump us to another page, scrolling just showed blank pages and thumbnails. Opened Activity Monitor and it was using little RAM and the CPU usage had dropped to about nothing. App became non-responsive, beach balled when trying to quit, so we Force Quit…ed(?). And, as I mentioned, this happened the next two times we opened the AP file.

Fortunately, we had just made a duplicate of the AP file itself, because we weren't thinking at the time and thought we were saving the original state, not realizing the whole linked document thing until later. We tossed the file that didn't work, renamed the copy to the original name, and it opened fine (though there was some real CPU run-up by AP, kicking on the fan of our 2018 Mac Mini, but that settled.) Images slowly showed up and everything's fine.

Anyway, it appears that bad file had become corrupted? By evil, maybe? We don't know.

We just wanted to give y'all this information in case it helps track down this issue.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We lost use of our Publisher document for three days, locking up on loading of images. Then, today, after the fourth try, it opened fine.

Our guess, based on this, is that there's a race condition that's causing the lockup.

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