Affinity Designer V2 getting really slow and laggy after some time

[zzbrufador]

I have Designer v2, but still rather using v1 because of these issues

[thegary]

I am still using V1. V2 is very slow , especially when zoomed in, painfully slow when trying to clean up a vector. Why isn't there a option for this yet?

V1 is my only way to go for work. So much faster and reliable. Wish this would get fixed. I have owned since the day it was announced and couldn't even use till recently due to the MSIX ( work won't let me use them ) . So just started with MSI, but so many bugs.

 

Gary

 

[DSGNDM]

The most worrying thing is the lack of information from the developers. Months have been passed from the release and the problem still affect the workflow. It can't be used for any designer, and it seems to be a recurrent problem. I've installed the V2 version on a new laptop with Windows 11 and a RTX 3050 and same problem.

Bugs and problems of stability and performance happens, it's not a big deal, but during several months after a release... That's not normal at all.
Sometimes I really regret of the purchase.

[Michu]

I have the same. On Windows 10 as well as on freshly installed Windows 11. Hardware: i5-9600, 16GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro K2200 (4GB). After about half an hour of work, the program slows down drastically. Only reboot helps. I had no such problems with version 1.

[Beck]

Jumping in on this convo - having the same issues. Thought it was my computer but never lagged this much when using Affinity 1. 

Any update on this? 

I create pretty heavy projects and Affinity 2 is just too slow. Unfortunately will be moving back all projects to Affinity. 

Hope this gets fixed

[Balakov]

I've been having this issue for years dating back to Designer V1 and the same issue has remained in V2. My job is making .NET Windows software so I've done some performance captures during the slowdown which hopefully might give the developers a bit more insight. I don't work with very heavy scenes, my normal workflow is to create a few scratchpad artboards, drop some reference images and then use the pen and shape tools to make my designs. I'm generally not using any advanced features.

The first perf capture is after about an hour or working. At this point clicking on objects is taking about 1 second to register and about the same time to switch tools. Memory use is around 3GB on a 32Gb machine (Designer is allowed 16GB in the settings). Dragging things around is very choppy. If I restart Designer everything comes back up to speed and memory usage drops to around 800MB. Not sure if that's relevant as the undo buffer won't be using any RAM on a fresh boot. The second attached image is the perf capture after a fresh boot with the same scene loaded.

An interesting new symptom that has appeared in V2 is that the Designer process no longer exits properly when it's got into this slow state. I have to kill it with the Task Manager before I can launch it again. The application window is not visible, only the process still exists.

The culprit in both cases seems to be Serif.Interop.Persona.DisposableResources.Find() which, in my naive interpretation sounds like a memory leak or cycle in the Garbage Collector. If I break the debugger while the process is trying to exit it never leaves that Find() method.

Anyway, hope that helps. Happy do do any more testing as this happens pretty much every time I do any work in Designer.

[MC909]

On 3/10/2023 at 11:57 AM, Balakov said:

If I restart Designer everything comes back up to speed and memory usage drops to around 800MB.

+1

[Nats1]

For the past few months I've now gone back to V1 of everything - I waste too much time with V2, sorry.

V2 I think has been released before it was actually ready.

[Nats1]

On 3/10/2023 at 11:57 AM, Balakov said:

I've been having this issue for years dating back to Designer V1 and the same issue has remained in V2. My job is making .NET Windows software so I've done some performance captures during the slowdown which hopefully might give the developers a bit more insight. I don't work with very heavy scenes, my normal workflow is to create a few scratchpad artboards, drop some reference images and then use the pen and shape tools to make my designs. I'm generally not using any advanced features.

The first perf capture is after about an hour or working. At this point clicking on objects is taking about 1 second to register and about the same time to switch tools. Memory use is around 3GB on a 32Gb machine (Designer is allowed 16GB in the settings). Dragging things around is very choppy. If I restart Designer everything comes back up to speed and memory usage drops to around 800MB. Not sure if that's relevant as the undo buffer won't be using any RAM on a fresh boot. The second attached image is the perf capture after a fresh boot with the same scene loaded.

An interesting new symptom that has appeared in V2 is that the Designer process no longer exits properly when it's got into this slow state. I have to kill it with the Task Manager before I can launch it again. The application window is not visible, only the process still exists.

The culprit in both cases seems to be Serif.Interop.Persona.DisposableResources.Find() which, in my naive interpretation sounds like a memory leak or cycle in the Garbage Collector. If I break the debugger while the process is trying to exit it never leaves that Find() method.

Anyway, hope that helps. Happy do do any more testing as this happens pretty much every time I do any work in Designer.

I hope they can fix things now

[AutumnPioneer]

I was recently emailed back by one of the developers. Apparently, the MSIX versions of the apps can be a bit buggy, so they recommended me to download the .exe installer versions instead. I haven't been using designer as much recently, but in my small amount of work it appears to be better?
On the downloads page you have to scroll down and find this part:
And install it with those files instead! Hope it works better for everyone else. Of course i'll update this post if it isn't in fact helping.

[Red Sands]

3 hours ago, AutumnPioneer said:

I was recently emailed back by one of the developers. Apparently, the MSIX versions of the apps can be a bit buggy, so they recommended me to download the .exe installer versions instead. I haven't been using designer as much recently, but in my small amount of work it appears to be better?

I have now almost completely abandoned Windows 11 as a platform for graphic work, and I can highly recommend it performance and stabilitywise - not to mention a definitive goodbye to problems with colour management across the entire operating system. But I'm just going to try this tip out on my Windows box.

If it helps, and MSIX has a fundamental problem with performance that we are experiencing, then this must be the final nail in the coffin for this unfortunate MSIX format as the primary format for Affinity for Windows.

MSIX sounds more like a sandbox in the classic sense. And yet another Microsoft hodgepodge of old food.

[Dangerous]

17 hours ago, AutumnPioneer said:

I was recently emailed back by one of the developers. Apparently, the MSIX versions of the apps can be a bit buggy, so they recommended me to download the .exe installer versions instead. I haven't been using designer as much recently, but in my small amount of work it appears to be better?
On the downloads page you have to scroll down and find this part:
And install it with those files instead! Hope it works better for everyone else. Of course i'll update this post if it isn't in fact helping.

I downloaded & installed the MSI versions as soon as I was aware they had been released (within 3 days) and have had few if any issues which I can not say was the case with the MSIX install. I would say that everyone should give the MSI version a try.

 

[Beck]

14 hours ago, Dangerous said:

I downloaded & installed the MSI versions as soon as I was aware they had been released (within 3 days) and have had few if any issues which I can not say was the case with the MSIX install. I would say that everyone should give the MSI version a try.

 

Thanks for this, I'll give this a try