Crashes within 5 seconds of launching: affecting all V2 Suite apps

[MadHugger]

Windows 10 v22H2, Intel i5-9600K

As Subj says, within roughly 5 seconds of launching any of the V2 Apps of Designer, Publisher and Photo; they will suddenly crash. I have been taking steps to use that roughly 5 seconds of time to review and change settings. Often, barely having enough time to save those changes before it crashes. All I have been able to do is allocate more RAM in hopes that would work. This is what was suggested to me when having sudden crashing issues with V1 Apps - which still occur. I have not been able to even begin to open a file, as it crashes in the process of attempting to open a file. So, logic tells ya that it is not document related.

With V1, I had noticed and had reported in the past that the crashing issues seems to cycle with App & Windows Updates. Once Affinity apps are seemingly stable for a period of time, Windows will update and the crashing starts again. Then the apps update and it stops. Oddly, uninstalling and re-installing did not affect this issue. By the way, V1 is back to crashing after some time - often when I am working on any file that has many embedded or link components within and happens after working on it for some time (regardless of saves). To me and my tech friends, they seem to think this is a ram/cache issue. Just paraphrasing their guesses.

I would love to share more details on my experience with V2 and its performance, but I never get enough time to capture anything or work on settings (preferences). Granted, I do not have a beast for doing graphic work but normally everything has worked fine - including Adobe CC which is a resource hog. What I can share is that over the years with V1 and the similar issue I had tried countless measures to troubleshoot and fix the "Sudden Crash" issue with no reliable results. This measures were advised by moderators and users of this forum as well as other tech forms where other users were experiencing the exact same and similar crash issues.

Honestly, a look under the hood of this software is needed. There are too many people reporting stability issues that would not have come up during "real world" testing.

[4dimage]

9 hours ago, MadHugger said:

Granted, I do not have a beast for doing graphic work but normally everything has worked fine - including Adobe CC which is a resource hog.

I have a beast for doing graphic work. But unfortunately i have to agree to some of this.

I worked with the Adobe stuff since the early 90s on both Mac and Windows (started with Photoshop 2.5) I have never experienced such unstable (professional commercial) software as with Affinity v2. I now stuck with Adobe CS 6 (don’t want to get forced into CC sh..) since around 2010 ? Even this at least 10 years old software, initialy developed for Windows 7 environment (?), works almost fine with Windows 10, more than ten years and 4 different machines later. I had some crashes with Photoshop/Illustrator using modern UTF8 Icon fonts (Fontawesome 5+). But that‘s it. If your machine had/has not enough resources Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign do also become really slow, scraping on the harddrive like mad at 100% CPU. But they remain stable and do their job to the end! Although their planed life span is long overdue…

[Pauls]

Is this crashing without any document open or in the process of loading at all ?

[SrPx]

On 12/6/2022 at 5:11 PM, MadHugger said:

Windows 10 v22H2, Intel i5-9600K

Are those 5 seconds (seems tight to be able to do it) enough for you to set "hardware acceleration - open cl" as non checked, off, but actually exit normally the app? As a crash avoids saving any preference setting. People are reporting more crashes and issues with Open CL than with memory allocated (but it can be an issue in very low memory (ie, a 4gb RAM laptop) cases or misconfiguration).  Also, showing preferences-> Performance, and preferences-> tools screenshots here could be very helpful. Specially as that's a system (unless you left some detail out) with no card, it's using the integrated CPU graphics. Also, how much RAM has got your system (to compare to what's set on preferences, etc). Windows tells you that in Windows Settings-> System-> About (it even tells you how much memory is really allocated and how much is reserved. Usually not a prob with intel). Another setting interesting to check (again, if fast enough to exit normally so that the setting is saved)  is to set the renderer as WARP, instead of your integrated graphics. If it stops then crashing, that fact gives valuable info.

If it's crashing, it's not saving the preference, so, another way to avoid the Open CL issues is to directly launch Affinity without Open CL, like recommended here: