Why does Affinity Designer or Photo take So Long to load on Mac 11.3.1?

[richardschultz]

Something odd has apparently happened in the past month or two. Previously these would fire up as quickly as my other apps. Now they take Forever! I'm running the most recent versions of both. What is the deal please? BTW 2017 MacBook Pro, maxed out. Thanks!

[Callum]

Hi Richard,

Welcome to the forums

When the apps finally open do they automatically open any projects too? If you reinstall the apps does this continue? Have you changed any of your performance settings  in the preferences of the apps recently?

Thanks

C

[PixelPest]

Same here on a 16GB/M1-MacMini. First start seems to take forever compared to other apps which start within a blink of an eye even running through Rosetta. A second start is dramatically faster. But after closing and not using for hours start is slow again. Publisher starts much faster in general. I know this behaviour only from new installed/upgraded apps collecting fonts for the first time for example.

Can you advice me how to set up Preferences/Performance? I don't know which Display: from the 4 types and the "Use only integrated GPU"?

Thanks in advance.

[MEB]

Hi @richardschultz, @PixelPest,
This is a known issue caused by Apple’s ‘YARA’ malware scanning our app. Please see this thread for more info (Patrick's posts). We are still seeing if we can improve things here. Thank you.

[PixelPest]

Ok - thanks for the link. Strange though that other apps don't take that long. But Patrick explained why my Publisher starts faster; it's because it's not from the Affinity Store and not App Store.

Any advice on my Preference/Performance setting to share for the use on a M1MacMini?

[MEB]

Hi @PixelPest,
Yes, it's bit weird. It's possible we are missing something thus the ongoing investigation.

Affinity Apps should pick the correct settings for you. It should have selected Metal for the Display and ticked Enable Metal compute acceleration.
 

[PixelPest]

Display was set to OpenGL; I will change to Metal

Use only integrated GPU is unchecked; Should I check?

Hardware Acceleration is correct detected.

Thanks again.

[MEB]

 @PixelPest,
No, you can leave that alone/unticked. There's no dedicated GPU on the Mac M1 - it's all integrated on a chip (SoC).

[PixelPest]

Thanks @MEB. Required 2 restarts but now up and running and setting is sticky.

[v_kyr]

46 minutes ago, BofG said:

I think the key part is the "JIT" mentioned, it seems the Affinity apps are packaged in a way that requires some "Just In Time" compilation - executable instructions written at run time. ...

• Allow Execution of JIT-compiled Code Entitlement
  A Boolean value that indicates whether the app may create writable and executable memory using the MAP_JIT flag.

Quote

...

You can create memory that’s both writable and executable by passing the MAP_JIT flag to the mmap() system function. The Hardened Runtime disallows this by default, because it creates a security risk. However, some apps and system frameworks rely on this functionality, typically for performance reasons. Examples include:

• The fast-path of the JavaScriptCore framework

• Certain Python frameworks

• Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE)

• An app that creates a dynamically-compiled, proprietary macro language

Without the Allow Execution of JIT-compiled Code Entitlement, frameworks that rely on just-in-time (JIT) compilation may fall back to an interpreter. Other code using JIT compilation may crash or behave in unexpected ways.

Digital rights management (DRM) solutions that currently use unsigned executable memory should instead change to using the MAP_JIT flag and the entitlement.

To add the entitlement to your app, first enable the Hardened Runtime capability in Xcode, and then under Runtime Exceptions, select Allow Execution of JIT-compiled Code.

 

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, BofG said:

Mystery solved. Embedded browser. Maybe this can be changed in the future to a native interface?

Well obviously it would be some embedded used service like that. - From a software technical design view there are for sure several different approaches possible to overcome with that, by either not (re)using the embedded MacOS webkit, or exclude that and route it to separate on demand accessed service processes, or reusing instead the systems default browser ... etc.

[tariq]

the user account functions should be moved to a separate app - they are added weight and bloat on the actual core tools

and the "web" component should be removed, and native UI components should be used to display content

sorry but this is basic software design