Designer performance with big documents?

[Fixx]

Would you please check if Designer can or cannot handle big vector file. I have older MBP with 16 GB RAM and lot of SSD space and handling any bigger files is very tedious. Like, select an object, wait for spinning ball to go away 90 seconds, delete the object, wait again... repeat, wait, repeat, wait.

Is that NORMAL?  

Document is a 7 MB PDF, all vector. Saved as Affinity it is 60 MB.

Spinning ball indicates it is totally a memory shortage problem. I have still version 1.xxx. Does version 2 handle it better? Is M1/M2 mac better? Or is 16 GB always too little for that kind of document?

Here is a link for the document if you want to test: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mq9zzanouyyy7o5ppxicf/02-Asemapiirustus.pdf?rlkey=x48q2bs3nzefgbr9niw5ejwjq&dl=0

[R C-R]

FWIW, it took about 10 seconds to open in AD V1 on my iMac (specs below in my sig). No spinning beachball but "Loading 1 document" appeared at the top of the document window while it was loading. Also, I do not have the MalgunGothic font installed so Lucida Grande was substituted but that probably is irrelevant.

My best guess is 16 GB of RAM vs. my 32GB makes the difference.

EDIT: forgot to add it is about the same for me using V2 as V1.

[GaryLearnTech]

M1 Mac mini (2020) • 16GB RAM, 2TB drive with approx 1TB free space • Ventura 13.4.1 • Designers v1.10.6 and v2.1.1

Over several passes, file open time ranged from about 16s to about 18s in both Designer 1 and Designer 2.  That was with "instantly" clicking Open on the initial PDF Options dialog box (like @R C-R, to substitute Lucida Grande) and would go some way to account for minor variations.  Opening the file in Preview took about 10s.

Selecting objects on the canvas was almost instant (when I could click straight), with the object being highlighted and the layer located almost immediately (layers auto-scroll was on).

Pressing the Delete key (or clicking the Layers panel trash icon) would take about four seconds to complete deletion.  Not snappy, but probably understandable for the complexity of the document.  Certainly nothing like the 90s of beach-balling you are seeing!

Changing the stroke width, colour or fill of a selected curve was immediate.

Hope this helps?

[v_kyr]

Well having fast I/O hardware is good to have & essential here for performance gains. So the more RAM and the faster an SSD is the better, beside having enough fast operating and behaving CPU/GPU cores too. - Mac M1/M2 SoC based hardware (with SSDs >= 512 GB) should usually easily outperform here the older Intel based Mac hardware.

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, GaryLearnTech said:

Selecting objects on the canvas was almost instant (when I could click straight), with the object being highlighted and the layer located almost immediately (layers auto-scroll was on).

I got similar results except that drag-selecting multiple objects (in V2 with auto-select objects enabled) could take several seconds, as did several other operations involving lots of objects.

[Fixx]

Most trouble was about selecting inside a group by doubleclick. Looks though modern mac can handle this kind of documents with only 16 GB RAM. About time to start looking for a new M-based mac I guess.

Thank you all for testing.