Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?

[nickbatz]

Mac Studio Max, 64GB, 32-core GPU, Affinity Photo 2.0.3, macOS Ventura 13.1

It often hangs for a good 20 seconds on quit, but only when I've closed a large file (as my files tend to be).

Come to think of it, this may happen when I just close the file too, I forget. But it's only when I have a file open, i.e. if I just open the program and quit right away it doesn't do that.

Is it saving a recovery file? Even that seems slow, considering the speed of the storage on these machines.

Not a show-stopper, I just want to see whether there's anything I can do to make the program happier.

[MikeTO]

Wow, I'm surprised to hear this for such a speedy system. I haven't experienced this at all on a MBP 14" with my documents but perhaps they aren't as complex as yours.

[nickbatz]

In general the program is responsive on this machine. It's clearly confused when I quit - but not always, just some of the time.

[Old Bruce]

17 hours ago, nickbatz said:

It often hangs for a good 20 seconds on quit, but only when I've closed a large file (as my files tend to be).

This could be caused by a large amount of data on the clipboard. Before closing make a tiny selection and copy it but remember to deselect after copying as the selection will be retained.

[nickbatz]

4 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

This could be caused by a large amount of data on the clipboard. Before closing make a tiny selection and copy it but remember to deselect after copying as the selection will be retained.

That sounds totally plausible. Thanks.

That's not to say that it's normal for a clipboard to have this effect on a program, but it does seem like a very likely culprit. I do copy and paste a lot of very large chunks.

[nickbatz]

Question: is the clipboard content saved with a file?

I just opened up a picture, closed it because it was the wrong on, and got the spinning ball.

it could also just be that each layer is saved. Like all my pictures, this one has a lot of them.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, nickbatz said:

Question: is the clipboard content saved with a file?

If you mean saved in the file, then no, it is not.

[nickbatz]

I mean exactly what I asked: whether it's saved for recall with a file. And you say no. I didn't think it was. Thanks.

And since I just opened a file and then closed it, that means Bruce's theory is probably not what's happening, at least it's not the only thing happening - which surprises me, because I was having problems 

This seems like a glitch. I'll narrow down the problem and then file a support ticket.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, nickbatz said:

I mean exactly what I asked: whether it's saved for recall with a file.

No, the last clipboard contents is not saved within any file. You can easily try out, by creating an APh file copying something to the APh clipboard, saving the file, closing APh and restarting it and opening the previous saved file again (...there shouldn't be anything to paste back then).

3 hours ago, nickbatz said:

And since I just opened a file and then closed it, that means Bruce's theory is probably not what's happening, at least it's not the only thing happening - which surprises me, because I was having problems

Well, if you just close a file and not APh itself, then the last clipboard contents is still in APh's clipboard memory for reuse of course here.

If you just close APh without let's say having saved a document you were working on, then APh will create an autosave (recovery) file on it's close. Depending on the documents contents size (...many huge layers etc.), so if it is a huge one and saving with history is enabled or snapshots are used, it can be slower in saving as usual. - Though on your used hardware it should usually be either way fast here.

[nickbatz]

22 hours ago, v_kyr said:

No, the last clipboard contents is not saved within any file. You can easily try out, by creating an APh file copying something to the APh clipboard, saving the file, closing APh and restarting it and opening the previous saved file again (...there shouldn't be anything to paste back then).

Well, if you just close a file and not APh itself, then the last clipboard contents is still in APh's clipboard memory for reuse of course here.

If you just close APh without let's say having saved a document you were working on, then APh will create an autosave (recovery) file on it's close. Depending on the documents contents size (...many huge layers etc.), so if it is a huge one and saving with history is enabled or snapshots are used, it can be slower in saving as usual. - Though on your used hardware it should usually be either way fast here.

Thanks. And yes, of course you're right about the clipboard. I wasn't thinking.

The recovery file must be the answer, and I agree that it should be fast on my machine, between the computer horsepower and the storage.

And presumably the recovery files are saved on the internal storage, which is ridiculously fast. But my external m.2 drive with my Affinity files is in a Thunderbolt enclosure that's still very fast, even though it benchmarks at a little under half the speed of the ridiculously expensive internal storage.

So I think there's an issue. Is it just me?

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, nickbatz said:

So I think there's an issue. Is it just me?

You have to chek and try out for some of your huge documents, where you made a bunch of changes to, if there's a difference in a plain save versus save as..., since the first will save incrementally to the/an existing file and the second will save to an entirely new created file in one go, before closing the app. - If there's a beachball in either of the two methods when closing the app, then it might be some Ventura related Affinity glitch here. - Check also how other apps do behave here in contrast to the Affinity apps.

[nickbatz]

13 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

You have to chek and try out for some of your huge documents, where you made a bunch of changes to, if there's a difference in a plain save versus save as..., since the first will save incrementally to the/an existing file and the second will save to an entirely new created file in one go, before closing the app. - If there's a beachball in either of the two methods when closing the app, then it might be some Ventura related Affinity glitch here. - Check also how other apps do behave here in contrast to the Affinity apps.

Thanks. This happened a couple of days ago after I closed a file I'd opened by mistake, i.e. I made no changes and didn't Save or Save As. Or maybe I just quit, but either way I didn't save anything. And it's happened since, but I forget what the circumstances were.

It may well be a Ventura-related Affinity glitch. I don't have the same issue with other programs on this machine, including Logic Pro and DaVinci Resolve (the other two programs I use that can create large files).

By the way, Affinity's tech support nailed a similar issue I was having when copy/pasting layers with their first question - I had forgotten about the clipboard manager in BetterTouchTool, that otherwise magnificent utility. But that's still disabled for Affinity Photo 2, so it's not that this time.

[R C-R]

Are the file(s) that cause the beachballs stored anywhere else besides you internal SSD?  Is there anything in them that might be linked to other files that are not stored on the SSD?

[nickbatz]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Are the file(s) that cause the beachballs stored anywhere else besides you internal SSD?  Is there anything in them that might be linked to other files that are not stored on the SSD?

The Affinity files are on an external SSD - again, a 4TB m.2 one in a Thunderbolt enclosure that does 2500 MB/S read and write. Yes, I'm guessing they are linked to recovery files on the internal storage.

And that shouldn't matter, even if the external SSD were SATA 2 (which has about 10% the transfer rate). Using external drives is a totally normal thing to do.

It's going to be hard to troubleshoot, because it doesn't do it every time. Just now it quit right away, for example.

For what it's worth, Saving As the 650MB file I have open right now (before quitting) takes ten seconds. The beachball on quit is much longer than that - long enough to make me force-quit the program.

 

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, nickbatz said:

It's going to be hard to troubleshoot, because it doesn't do it every time.

Does it ever do it when the documents are stored on the internal SSD? If not, it points to something odd with the external one or the Thunderbolt connection.

[nickbatz]

25 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Does it ever do it when the documents are stored on the internal SSD? If not, it points to something odd with the external one or the Thunderbolt connection.

I don't know, because I don't have the documents on the internal SSD.

But I use the external drive for all kinds of things, including very demanding music applications (specifically streaming large sample libraries, and you'd hear clicks and pops if there were any issues doing that), so I'm absolutely confident there's nothing wrong with the drive or the connection.

[nickbatz]

Also, it has no problems loading files into Affinity Photo ridiculously fast. And the program starts up (from the internal storage) in two seconds.

And I mean that literally - two seconds. It's really great!

[nickbatz]

Okay, this is now starting to become a real issue. Right now I'm going to have to force quit and lose some work that took me a while, which is somewhat less than thrilling.

Maybe the screenshot below from Activity Monitor will offer some insight. All I did was tell it to save, and several minutes later it's still showing the beachball.

Again: Mac Studio Max, 64GB, 32-core GPU, Affinity Photo 2.0.3, macOS Ventura 13.1

Why would any program need to use 435.54 GB of virtual memory?

[nickbatz]

And whoa. 27 recent hangs.

This warrants a support ticket. I can't believe that everyone is having the same experience.

 

[Dan C]

Hi @nickbatz,

Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.

Can you please confirm for me, does this issue still occur in the latest update (2.0.4) for you?

On 1/31/2023 at 4:11 AM, nickbatz said:

This warrants a support ticket. I can't believe that everyone is having the same experience.

Did you contact our support team directly following this thread? As I have checked for emails from your address associated with your forum account and have been unable to find a ticket - so I wanted to check if this was resolved by a member of our support team already.

Many thanks in advance

[nickbatz]

8 hours ago, Dan C said:

 

Did you contact our support team directly following this thread? As I have checked for emails from your address associated with your forum account and have been unable to find a ticket - so I wanted to check if this was resolved by a member of our support team already.

Many thanks in advance

Thanks Dan, and no problem. I reinstalled 2.0.4 and things got a lot better - not totally, but the beachball is appearing far less consistently, and it's short enough not to really matter when it happens.

Yes, I was remiss in contacting support, but if reinstalling the program solved 95% of the issue then it's probably a one-off.

Thanks again.