RAM Usage Limit setting - why fixed range?

[rvst]

In V1 of Affinity, I was able to override the RAM Usage Limit (or at least I think it was overridden) to a value larger than the slider range by manually typing a value into the field. I believe this static range was subsequently fixed, although I'm not certain of that

 

 

In V2, that no longer works. It resets to 65536 MB. Yet I have 128GB in my machine.

So  why is this slider range not being set to 0 - "Maximum Physical RAM"?

I frequently have all three products open simultaneously with several files loaded in each one. It would be nice if Affinity products could actually exploit all of the RAM I have. 

 

[R C-R]

Not sure about Windows but on my Mac the V1 apps enforced a 65536 MB limit, just like V2 does now.

14 minutes ago, rvst said:

I frequently have all three products open simultaneously with several files loaded in each one.

I am fairly sure each Affinity app can use up to 65536 MB, so I do not think there would be any benefit to setting all of them to more than that unless one of them actually needed more RAM than that.

And of course, it would be pointless to set the max to all the installed RAM because the OS will always reserve some of it for its own use. If it did not it would crash the computer.

[carl123]

1 hour ago, rvst said:

In V2, that no longer works. It resets to 65536 MB. Yet I have 128GB in my machine.

In V2 I can still override the slider value and it sticks after restarting the app

 

Windows 11

AFPhoto

[rvst]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

the OS will always reserve some of it for its own use. If it did not it would crash the computer.

It wouldn't crash the computer - it would just swap, slowing things down. But be that as it may, it's a bit silly to have a limit like this for no good reason other than the slider doesn't set a dynamic range

[NotMyFault]

Affinity apps unfortunately have a built-in limit how much RAM can be used by them. It was 64 GB in V1. UI allowed larger values, it had no effect.
 

This sounds insane like “640 KB RAM is enough” some decades ago. 

 

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, rvst said:

It wouldn't crash the computer - it would just swap, slowing things down. 

A certain amount of RAM must always be used by the OS itself & much of it cannot be swapped out -- for example the code that performs swaps& manages other aspects of memory use. In UNIX-like systems including the Mac OS this is called "wired memory."

[rvst]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

A certain amount of RAM must always be used by the OS itself & much of it cannot be swapped out -- for example the code that performs swaps& manages other aspects of memory use. In UNIX-like systems including the Mac OS this is called "wired memory."

I'm a kernel-level software engineer R-C-R. I know how OS memory management works thanks . 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, rvst said:

I'm a kernel-level software engineer R-C-R. I know how OS memory management works thanks . 

Then you know it is never possible to page out all the RAM the OS uses.

[rvst]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

Then you know it is never possible to page out all the RAM the OS uses.

Yes, but it isn't relevant to this issue, which is that a slider has been hard capped to an arbitrary number instead of setting the range "0 - InstalledRAM". Typically, I would set this slider to a certain percentage less than the available physical RAM

And it's not just the wired memory than can't be swapped out - there's also the working set for each process. If there's not enough physical RAM to contain the full working set of a process, then thrashing will occur.

 

[NathanC]

Hey @rvst,

Apologies on the late reply,

There is an issue logged with the developers which relates to manually entering into the RAM usage limit field, if you just highlight the numerical value and replace it and then click off/tab through to a different option, it will revert back to what it was set to previously.

If you highlight the entire field (Including the 'MB') and enter in a new value (even one which exceeds the limit) this should work and save as it did in V1. This is logged with the developers.

Though, as NMF has mentioned and linked to, it is purely visual and has no real effect. I'll bump the existing issue regarding this. 

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "RAM Usage Limit: Overwriting the numerical values but leaving the MB doesn't keep new values" (REF: AFP-5883) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.1.0.1806".

This fix is in the current customer release.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us