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Something I don't really understand is setting the maximum RAM usage etc in Preferences. Having done a search it would seem that the maximum amount shown should be the RAM that you have installed. I have 32GB of RAM installed, bur the maximum setting is shown as 65536 MB. I have no idea how these figures relate to each other!

I wonder if anyone could tell me what I should set the maximum to in each app, assuming I may have all three open at the same time, (possibly plus a web browser,) for best performance.

Thanks for any advice.

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Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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This is a good question, but difficult to answer.

All current computer use the concept of virtual RAM. Windows by default assigns much more VRAM than physical RAM. Only the actively used VRAM is mapped to RAM. So in Photo you cannot specify physical RAM, bur only VRAM.

What happens if your document needs more (v-)RAM than assigned? Affinity starts to use a file on disk. 
This normally doesn’t work well. Best practice is to let the OS manage RAM dynamically for Apps.

If you limit RAM in Affinity Apps, you are forcing the App to use the disk even if RAM is available.

On the other side, if you working set (the actual amount of RAM required by all apps at a specific time) is larger than the RAM, your OS starts paging to the pagefile, which has performance impact, too. But this will start later vs. statically reducing RAM in Affinity Apps.

Never the less, having insufficient RAM will bite the performance, and the only actual salvation is to add more RAM, use faster disks for pagefile (SSD, maybe dedicated, leaving enough free space on SSD), or closing unnecessary apps.

 

To make the situation more complex: some users reported issues where reducing RAM in Photo actually helped as workaround. But this should only be used when required, and not precautionary.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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19 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Something I don't really understand is setting the maximum RAM usage etc in Preferences. Having done a search it would seem that the maximum amount shown should be the RAM that you have installed. I have 32GB of RAM installed, bur the maximum setting is shown as 65536 MB. I have no idea how these figures relate to each other!

This appears to be a bug. See the recent thread I posted on the same subject https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/152526-affinity-photodesignerpublisher-performance-settings-ram-usage-limit-bug/

It does the same for me and I in effect have double the amount of RAM that Affinity could use. 

The slider should, if correctly initialised, have a range 0 - [installed amount of RAM]

 

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10 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Having done a search it would seem that the maximum amount shown should be the RAM that you have installed.

You might think that but the reality is no app can ever use all the installed RAM. The OS will always reserve a certain (& dynamically changing) amount for its own exclusive use, & there is no way for any app running in user space to change that.

In fact, most apps do not even offer a built-in RAM use limit, instead letting the OS manage how much RAM each user space process can use without paging to VM, marking data held in memory or VM as stale & purgeable, & so on.

From what the Affinity developers have said in the past, the RAM limit option is there only to make it possible for more RAM to be used by other apps that might be running concurrently with Affinity, possibly improving their performance at the expense of reducing the performance of Affinity.

 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Thanks for all the help.

I wasn't sure if having the limit set high on all three apps might affect how well they worked together, when they were all open at the same time. but it sounds like there's no problem. As I tend not to have much else open at the same time as the three Affinity apps, I guess the easiest thing is  to leave them all set fairly high and just let Windows do it's thing! 🙂

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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8 hours ago, DWright said:

By default this setting in the Affinity apps is set to half the installed RAM on your computer to avoid conflict with other apps running on your computer

What would happen if these apps just left it to the OS to manage memory use?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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7 minutes ago, R C-R said:

What would happen if these apps just left it to the OS to manage memory use?

Expect it will work better on most cases.

If Affinity needs more RAM than configured max, its starts using a backup file.

In case there is insufficient RAM, nothing won vs. OS which i expect to be far more efficient doing paging with MMU hardware support.
And in case the RAM is not used by other apps, even worse performance caused by superfluous disk usage.

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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1 minute ago, NotMyFault said:

Expect it will work better on most cases.

I think you are probably right about that, for the same reasons you mentioned.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 5 weeks later...

This is so confusing. Why isn't there a spreadsheet to explain how to set the Performance settings according to the config. of one's computer?

I have 8 GB of Ram on a 2017 iMac. I had set the RAM to 8192MB in preferences, thinking that's the nearest number to 8 GB on the slider. Disk space: 1 TB.

I am only assuming I have a RAM problem because the tools get "stuck" from time to time, especially after hours of multi-layer work. Currently my eraser tool is not working at all, despite de-selecting everything like crazy. If I use the keyboard short cut "e" to get the eraser, still nothing. Interruptions to workflow keep occuring. I have worked out the bug of hitting the space bar to escape one of the stuck tool problems, but today the eraser being inaccessible is very frustrating indeed.

Any clues? I am bewildered (25 years user of Photoshop, 5 years user of Affinity Photo, so no newbie)

 

 

Screen Shot 2021-12-11 at 8.00.35 pm.png

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Me again - I solved it - not the RAM issue but the eraser. I had a custom brush selected from a previous session when I made some custom art brushes, and this seemed to render the eraser brush useless, despite being 100% Opacity etc. Still learning! I hope my error helps others anyway.

 

I still would like to see more info on the Performance settings  - I've watched the videos but they don't answer the numbers questions.

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If you have a RAM limit set, and Affinity needs more RAM, it will start to use a file on disk and heavily swap. I forgot the exact file path, but you should be able to use a system monitor app and check if your disk got busy 100%.

In some cases there are actual bugs in Affinity (memory leaks) and you cannot do anything about it.

In principle: forget this setting. It does not help to fiddle around.

There is a rare exception if you are using multiple Apps, reducing the RAM for Affinity could improve the performance of other Apps (but not the performance of the App where RAM limit is reduced).

If the RAM limit is set to the size of physically installed RAM, there is no way to change this slider and improve performance.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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On 11/11/2021 at 8:11 AM, DWright said:

By default this setting in the Affinity apps is set to half the installed RAM on your computer to avoid conflict with other apps running on your computer

That’s interesting…

But then I read the following, taken from Lee D’s FAQ post about Performance: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/119917-faq-performance-related-issues/
RAM usage: By default it’s set to the amount of RAM your system has, some users have reported getting better performance by adjusting this slider. However we do have conflicting feedback, some report increased performance when lowering and others when increasing this by small increments.


Perhaps some clarification of the clarification is needed?

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9 hours ago, C.L. said:

I have 8 GB of Ram on a 2017 iMac. I had set the RAM to 8192MB in preferences, thinking that's the nearest number to 8 GB on the slider.

Actually, if 'About This Mac' says you have 8 GB of RAM, you really have 8192 MB installed. That's because RAM modules only come in power of 2 increments, so you probably have two 4096 MB modules installed (2^12) or possibly four 2048 MB modules (2^11) or one 8192 MB (2^13) module. More about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units but what it amounts to is you have 8 gibibytes installed.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is there a way to set the Max RAM usage on a office wide level on all machines through PDQ or script? 

After installing all of our users have their Preferences max RAM usage to Maximum by Default, which is causing some issues. How can we change this globally without having to ask every user to go in and change it themselves?

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8 minutes ago, lmd said:

Is there a way to set the Max RAM usage on a office wide level on all machines through PDQ or script? 

After installing all of our users have their Preferences max RAM usage to Maximum by Default, which is causing some issues. How can we change this globally without having to ask every user to go in and change it themselves?

On Windows the RAM amount is set in this file....

C:\Users\*******\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo\1.0\Settings\PerformancePreferences.xml

You should be able to write a simple script to modify the value or simply overwrite their existing PerformancePreferences.xml file with one containing the new value(s) you want in it

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/10/2021 at 10:43 AM, NotMyFault said:

This is a good question, but difficult to answer.

All current computer use the concept of virtual RAM. Windows by default assigns much more VRAM than physical RAM. Only the actively used VRAM is mapped to RAM. So in Photo you cannot specify physical RAM, bur only VRAM.

What happens if your document needs more (v-)RAM than assigned? Affinity starts to use a file on disk. 
This normally doesn’t work well. Best practice is to let the OS manage RAM dynamically for Apps.

If you limit RAM in Affinity Apps, you are forcing the App to use the disk even if RAM is available.

On the other side, if you working set (the actual amount of RAM required by all apps at a specific time) is larger than the RAM, your OS starts paging to the pagefile, which has performance impact, too. But this will start later vs. statically reducing RAM in Affinity Apps.

Never the less, having insufficient RAM will bite the performance, and the only actual salvation is to add more RAM, use faster disks for pagefile (SSD, maybe dedicated, leaving enough free space on SSD), or closing unnecessary apps.

 

To make the situation more complex: some users reported issues where reducing RAM in Photo actually helped as workaround. But this should only be used when required, and not precautionary.

This is what's happening to me. I can work in AD for 2-3 hrs max, before it starts acting laggy,choppy and slooooow. I'm on a new brand pc, with 8 gb of ram and a rtx 3050ti. Either you need at leas 16 gb of ram to work with the affinity suite, or there's a big memory leak ...or both. Disappointing.

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6 hours ago, JPBERUTTI910 said:

This is what's happening to me. I can work in AD for 2-3 hrs max, before it starts acting laggy,choppy and slooooow. I'm on a new brand pc, with 8 gb of ram and a rtx 3050ti. Either you need at leas 16 gb of ram to work with the affinity suite, or there's a big memory leak ...or both. Disappointing.

It could be AD, or it could be any other process running in background on your PC, or the OS itself.
I get this issue with any app (Affinity, M365, Video Cutter, …), on any PC (I have used at least 8 different PCs with Windows 10, private and corporate).

Latest issue was a VPN software leading to 100% cpu after several hours of running (unrelated if VPN was used, affected all app).

We don’t know, it is extremely difficult to analyze. I get days where AD runs perfectly over hours, with multiple open documents. On other days I need to reboot the PC more than once because the system gets unstable  (laggy, hanging, rendering issues, …)

From a user perspective it is disappointing, but you can’t blame Affinity for issues on HW, OS, driver level.

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

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