Affinity Photo memory usage/relinquishing questions

[R C-R]

17 hours ago, v_kyr said:

However, under MacOS your best option for closer processes & threads mem consumption inspection is the Activity Monitor, or terminal CLI tools like top & leaks etc. The later leaks is especially useful for searching a process's memory for unreferenced malloc buffers and thus possible memeory leaks!

I wonder if there are any other tools that could provide any clues about why, like the OP reports, apps like Logic Pro might become unstable after running & quitting AP. Those symptoms suggest there might be some resource shared with the other app(s) that AP is somehow damaging, but that is just a wild guess.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Interesting view. I'd rather say in Affinity every task runs in realtime...

But not every task does. For example, painting with a very large brush often results in a delay before the results are rendered in the document window, particularly on systems with slower CPUs & low power GPU's.

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

But not every task does. For example, painting with a very large brush often results in a delay before the results are rendered in the document window, particularly on systems with slower CPUs & low power GPU's.

Ah, that's true of course. From this perspective Affinity does not vary from other apps: some tasks run slow. Then playing audio or video is like displaying a brush stroke. Sometimes "realtime" is used like "live": In Affinity there is no option to let a certain task run either now or at later moment. You can't brush in the morning but get it rendered in the afternoon.

[v_kyr]

17 hours ago, nickbatz said:

There's one going around for Logic Pro X that... okay, now I forget, but they run 50 billion reverbs or something. There's one with a number of tracks count... maybe the same one.

See related:

• Logic Pro M1 (Pro & Max) Benchmarks

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I wonder if there are any other tools that could provide any clues about why, like the OP reports, apps like Logic Pro might become unstable after running & quitting AP. ...

Well most of those tools are part of the development tools around XCode and so overall more useful when developing apps (... where you then have the source code too) ...

• Gathering Information About Memory Use
• Identifying High-Memory Use with Jetsam Event Reports
• Making Changes to Reduce Memory Use
• Standard Memory Debugging Tools (Zombies, Address Sanitizer, Guard Malloc ...)
• ... etc.

For commercial plain binary apps, where you don't have the sources for, it's harder to get any indeep views for what is happening with those then under certain conditions. There are the common Activity Monitor, and Unix CLI tools like top, leaks, ps, dtrace, execsnoop, iosnoop ... etc. - And of course the hard core 3'rd party tools like Hopper & IDA Pro etc. for those who like to peek & poke more around at the byte level.

 

[nickbatz]

Obviously every event in the universe happens in time!

Realtime means things with timing that has to correspond to real time - video and audio. There can be a small amount of latency, but it has to remain perfectly constant.

As to benchmarks, like many specs they’re a useful guide - some more than others, but they don’t always put real world use in perspective.

I seem to remember Affinity Photo’s benchmark panel having a similar disclaimer, in fact.

[nickbatz]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

See related:

• Logic Pro M1 (Pro & Max) Benchmarks

Right, and you have to use many instances of Alchemy and Diva for that to be totally relevant.

It does tell you that CPU is unlikely to be a bottleneck with an Apple Silicon Mac. But musicians typically use instrument and processing plug-ins from multiple companies. Some run on a single core (at least on Intel Macs), others don't.

In some cases, sample library developers license Native Instruments Kontakt sampler to play their libraries. They're always heavily scripted, and the complexity of the scripting is a major variable. So is the size and number of samples being streamed simultaneously. And the effects being used inside Kontakt.

Logic itself has quirks about how things get assigned to processors, in fact a lot of musicians (me included) often use another program - Vienna Ensemble Pro - as a plug-in host on local machines, streaming into Logic. It also works over a network when you use multiple computers, so they effectively act like another program running on the local machine. VE Pro is fantastic, and sometimes instruments that strain inside Logic have more breathing room inside VE Pro.

Anyway, my point is that anecdotal reports about how things work on various machines are also useful. My only objection to benchmarks is when people think quoting them makes them sound intelligent.

 

[v_kyr]

15 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

... Anyway, my point is that anecdotal reports about how things work on various machines are also useful. My only objection to benchmarks is when people think quoting them makes them sound intelligent.

Personally I can't tell you much about music & audio related software (Logic Pro and Co. ... etc.) and thus benchmarking with those here. Since that's not my domain and so the only things I've done/or dealt so far with audio is, writing a simple audio tool app, which specifically autodetects my personal set of headsets and then switches the audio/mic to the one actually in use here. - So I can't really tell you if such music related benchmarks are of any value at all here in order to compare different CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD equiped systems here. - In contrast to that I know one or two things more about video cutting and rendering and how to stress test systems with those, but that's also not my main domain.

My domain is more related to the development branch and thus dealing with a bunch of huger tools like DBs, AppServer backends, containers and additional other longer sustained & running services, all at once over longer time periods. Having a system with good memory management and always enough RAM- & storage memory in reserve, is also always an essential & significant part here. It's also a usage scenario where common system based bottlenecks in terms of memory & storage handling will early be detectable to show up. - However, in contrast to usual benchmarking sets/suites, setup & configuartion are in my domain more day lasting tasks here and thus much more time consuming tasks than firing up some tiny CPU/GPU benchmark app.

 

[nickbatz]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

a simple audio tool app, which specifically autodetects my personal set of headsets and then switches the audio/mic to the one actually in use here

 

Simple to you! Sounds very useful.

And yes, audio system set-up is important - all the more so with hardware coming back in vogue, needing to be integrated.

[thomaso]

58 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

writing a simple audio tool app, which specifically autodetects my personal set of headsets and then switches the audio/mic to the one actually in use here

Is this comparable to what Soundflower does?

 

Quote

 

Free audio routing solution

Soundflower is a free system extension that lets you channel audio from one application to another. Perhaps you want to take the audio playing in a movie in your web browser and record it using QuickTime's audio input? Inter-application audio driver Soundflower can help you do this by emulating the interface of an audio device and allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed.

 

https://soundflower.en.softonic.com/mac

[nickbatz]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Is this comparable to what Soundflower does?

 

https://soundflower.en.softonic.com/mac

Soundflower is for audio loopback - routing audio between programs.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Is this comparable to what Soundflower does?

Nope, my tool detects and switches between audio devices via the help of Apple's CoreServices & CoreAudio frameworks.

[nickbatz]

Update: here's a screenshot showing Activity Monitor and Memory Clean after quitting Affinity Photo (having had a large picture with many layers open). The only programs I have open here are Activity Monitor itself, some small utility apps that always run when I start up (BetterTouchTool, etc.), Apple Mail, and the app that controls my audio interface.

Normally I'd have maybe 50GB available, not 22. (Will restart and edit the 50GB to the actual amount; suffice it to say, it's way more than 22GB.)

I still can't figure out what's going on.

[nickbatz]

And after restarting, same programs open. Why was it using 41.78GB of RAM above?

I should add that after posting above, I launched Logic Pro X. Logic wasn't unstable, but it was running very slowly.

Of course, it's quite possible that something funny is going on in my system. But it is only affecting Affinity Photo, or I should say only affecting my system after quitting AP.

AP is running absolutely fine, so it doesn't seem likely to be a corrupted installation.

[Tommy Turtle]

I can’t help but feel that you’ve got a lot of apps running in the background here - Take a look at the Idrivedeamon, look at how many open ports it has - and then after the machine has been rebooted - there something leaking on your machine, for sure!

As a starting point, would be sensible to uninstall everything that runs in the background at start up and see if the problem goes away - try and get your Mac back to as clean state as possible  - to me, there is far far too much going on with your machine to say conclusively this problem has anything to do with Affinity directly, rather than as a side effective of one of those other apps, and your process list extends way beyond the screen too. 

[R C-R]

11 hours ago, nickbatz said:

The only programs I have open here are Activity Monitor itself, some small utility apps that always run when I start up (BetterTouchTool, etc.), Apple Mail, and the app that controls my audio interface.

Your screenshot shows Messages, Dropbox, iMazing Mini, IDriveMonitor, & several other items are open, but not Apple Mail.

Are you sure you posted the correct screenshot?

[thomaso]

11 hours ago, nickbatz said:

And after restarting, same programs open. Why was it using 41.78GB of RAM above?

App (launch) and documents (opened, linked resources) are two pair of socks. Also, macOS doesn't necessarily free all RAM immediately unless it will be required by other processes.

11 hours ago, nickbatz said:

possible that something funny is going on in my system

You can prevent possible funny things when you boot in Safe mode (hold Shift until the start sound). This limits the possible processes to minimum needs (e.g. prevents auto-start of non-Apple processes and prevents some Apple features). Then everything runs slower but you could test your RAM behavior when closing APhoto without possible influence by third party non-Apple processes.

Another option would be to check installed software including background processes (apps, daemons, …) by EtreCheck. It reads only+ reports the installed system related software in a sorted list and marks them as currently running or not, and marks those which are known to possibly causing issues.

For instance your "Memory Clean 2" might be a candidate because it affects and accesses RAM in its own way and might thus conflict with the macOS way of memory management.

For a screenshot of the Activity Monitor it may be useful to limit the list by selecting "active processes". That reduces possible confusion caused by those which aren't currently running.

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

Also, macOS doesn't necessarily free all RAM immediately unless it will be required by other processes.

Which basically means that even if there just is (for example) 20 GB of RAM available, unless some other process(es) need more than that, it is unlikely that the OS will quickly start removing all the data currently still leftover in RAM from running & then quitting some app, whether it is an Affinity one or not.

IOW, the 'memory pressure' shown in the graph in Activity Monitor is a good way to tell if you are actually running out of available free memory or not. In both of the OP's last two screenshots memory pressure is very low, indicating that whatever the issue is that is causing problems, it is very unlikely that it is directly caused by a lack of available memory.

[nickbatz]

11 hours ago, Tommy Turtle said:

I can’t help but feel that you’ve got a lot of apps running in the background here - Take a look at the Idrivedeamon, look at how many open ports it has - and then after the machine has been rebooted - there something leaking on your machine, for sure!

As a starting point, would be sensible to uninstall everything that runs in the background at start up and see if the problem goes away - try and get your Mac back to as clean state as possible  - to me, there is far far too much going on with your machine to say conclusively this problem has anything to do with Affinity directly, rather than as a side effective of one of those other apps, and your process list extends way beyond the screen too. 

Except that this only happens after quitting Affinity Photo.

I need everything that's running to be running - it's absolutely not gratuitous junk, for example iDrive is a cloud backup.

Thanks though.

 

[nickbatz]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

Your screenshot shows Messages, Dropbox, iMazing Mini, IDriveMonitor, & several other items are open, but not Apple Mail.

Are you sure you posted the correct screenshot?

Ah, you're right, it's not running in the first one.

But you can see in the second screenshot that it's taking up less than 1GB of RAM. I have 64GB installed, so it's irrelevant here in any case.

[nickbatz]

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

App (launch) and documents (opened, linked resources) are two pair of socks. Also, macOS doesn't necessarily free all RAM immediately unless it will be required by other processes.

You can prevent possible funny things when you boot in Safe mode (hold Shift until the start sound). This limits the possible processes to minimum needs (e.g. prevents auto-start of non-Apple processes and prevents some Apple features). Then everything runs slower but you could test your RAM behavior when closing APhoto without possible influence by third party non-Apple processes.

Another option would be to check installed software including background processes (apps, daemons, …) by EtreCheck. It reads only+ reports the installed system related software in a sorted list and marks them as currently running or not, and marks those which are known to possibly causing issues.

For instance your "Memory Clean 2" might be a candidate because it affects and accesses RAM in its own way and might thus conflict with the macOS way of memory management.

For a screenshot of the Activity Monitor it may be useful to limit the list by selecting "active processes". That reduces possible confusion caused by those which aren't currently running.

 

All of that is good advice, but booting in safe mode and then trying to run Affinity Photo... that's not going to tell me anything, unfortunately.

Again: this is only after quitting Affinity Photo. Everything I have running is important, and I've had all these things running all day long for 50 years.

Okay, maybe only 49. But I have no intention of disabling anything I have running anyway, so it's sort of moot. It's not because I'm ornery - which I am - it's because I need things like BetterTouchTool, the driver for my audio interface, SwitchResX, iDrive, Dropbox... all that stuff.

Memory Clean doesn't do anything invasive unless you run a Clean operation. I did install an update recently, but this predates that.

Since I'm the only one reporting this, my hunch is that it's either the way Affinity Photo caches files for recovery (a feature, not a bug!) or just a glitch in my system.

[R C-R]

12 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

Except that this only happens after quitting Affinity Photo.

Besides having less free memory than you expected available after quitting AP, what specifically is it that you consider to be a problem? If it is just that some other app(s) do not seem to work as quickly as expected, or is there more to it than that?

Again, please consider that there are likely to be many items still in memory after quitting AP because they are shared by other processes which either still might be running, or the OS determines it is likely that they will be needed again soon, so the memory they use will not be freed up. If any of the other apps are using any of those items or soon will be, there may be something specific to one of those apps that is causing them to slow down.

[nickbatz]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Which basically means that even if there just is (for example) 20 GB of RAM available, unless some other process(es) need more than that, it is unlikely that the OS will quickly start removing all the data currently still leftover in RAM from running & then quitting some app, whether it is an Affinity one or not.

IOW, the 'memory pressure' shown in the graph in Activity Monitor is a good way to tell if you are actually running out of available free memory or not. In both of the OP's last two screenshots memory pressure is very low, indicating that whatever the issue is that is causing problems, it is very unlikely that it is directly caused by a lack of available memory.

Oh, I don't think I am running out of available memory. The issue is system instability - really just slowing down rather than crashing - after I quit Affinity Photo.

All these memory displays are just correlation, not necessarily the cause,

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

Since I'm the only one reporting this, my hunch is that it's either the way Affinity Photo caches files for recovery (a feature, not a bug!) or just a glitch in my system.

AP does cache files temporarily for recovery, but the cached items are stored in files in the user's Library/Application Support folder, not in memory. It would not make any since to keep them in memory since if the app crashed & system was restarted, there would be nothing in memory to restore.

[nickbatz]

7 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Besides having less free memory than you expected available after quitting AP, what specifically is it that you consider to be a problem? If it is just that some other app(s) do not seem to work as quickly as expected, or is there more to it than that?

Again, please consider that there are likely to be many items still in memory after quitting AP because they are shared by other processes which either still might be running, or the OS determines it is likely that they will be needed again soon, so the memory they use will not be freed up. If any of the other apps are using any of those items or soon will be, there may be something specific to one of those apps that is causing them to slow down.

 

Could well be. But ideally I wouldn't have to restart the computer.