Designer struggles after it's been open for a while

[Laurentrentrentrent]

I have about 30 artboard in this focument, tons of images and after working on it all day Designer really struggles to react, things take 10x longer.

It's fine after a relaunch.

[Laurentrentrentrent]

it's the docu

[EmT]

Hi @Laurentrentrentrent

Just a few questions: 

Is it only this document the issue occurs on? 

What is the size of the document and are the images linked or embedded? 

Could you also advise of your system specifications. 

Could you try unchecking OpenCL Compute Acceleration under Preferences > Performance and seeing if this helps. 

[Laurentrentrentrent]

It's the only time I've used it for an entire day and I never noticed mass slowdowns on other ones.

The images are embedded and the document in 159MB.

The system is an i5-8400 windows 10 with a 6GB vram 2060RTX and 32GB of ram, the SSD are 3GB/s speed RW

Since I am done with the document and don't plan on working on it for a day to check if unchecking CL changes things I cannot help on that. I will PM you the document as I think you have more advanced profiling tools.

[EmT]

As it is a large document, one thing that can help is setting the images to be linked rather than embedded.
https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Media/resourceManager.html?title=Resource Manager

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Media/embeddingVsLinking.html?title=Embedding vs linking

If going forward, you could switch off Open CL, you can see if that makes any difference to new documents you work on. 

[Laurentrentrentrent]

31 minutes ago, EmT said:

As it is a large document, one thing that can help is setting the images to be linked rather than embedded.
https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Media/resourceManager.html?title=Resource Manager

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Media/embeddingVsLinking.html?title=Embedding vs linking

If going forward, you could switch off Open CL, you can see if that makes any difference to new documents you work on. 

What's the shortcut modifier to turn a dragged and drop image into a link?

[EmT]

When you first set up the document, you can select 'Prefer Linked' you'll then be able to drag and drop as normal and all images will be linked. 

If you wish to amend this, you can change this in Resource Manager. The tutorial below should cover this.

 

[Laurentrentrentrent]

The resource manager is really good. How do I set prefer linked for a document already created?

I tried editing after setting to linked and the lag is already back after a minute so might not be a memory leak issue. Here is what I think happens: When I select an image it focuses and expands the hierarchy in the layers panel and this operation, which should be instant since it's so simple computationally, somehow causes a delay on windows. It's very likely the case as I tested this theory by manually expanding a hierarchy: it takes a certain time.

[EmT]

If you go to File > Placement Policy, you can then change the setting. 

DId you do that test with OpenCL off, was there any change in performance?

[Laurentrentrentrent]

10 hours ago, EmT said:

DId you do that test with OpenCL off, was there any change in performance?

I just did, it seems to be the same delay caused by layer foldout

[EmT]

Could you check if your OS and Graphics driver are up to date.

If they are then take a look at this forum post, do you have any of these other apps installed that we know can cause issues with Affinity. Have you tried doing a clean boot in Windows, again to check if any other windows processes are causing issues.

If the lag continues after this then could you try going through the below steps to revert the application to its default settings which may resolve your issue: 

1. Press Win + R and enter %APPDATA% and navigate to the 'Affinity' Folder. 

2. Right click the Designer/Photo/Publisher folder and compress the folder to ZIP to create a backup. 

3. On the application shortcut, click once onto the shortcut, hold down control and right click > open the application whilst still holding down control. 

4. This will prompt a new menu 'Clear User Data' with three boxes ticked, press 'Select All' then 'Clear' at the bottom right hand corner. 

5. Load the application back up to confirm if this has resolved the issue. 
 

The link below will advise you what is cleared and where assets are stored so they can be backed up.   

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/98906-what-exactly-do-the-clear-user-data-options-clear/&tab=comments#comment-529435   

[Laurentrentrentrent]

It seems to have solved this. Thank you.