Saving a file on a remote drive crashes Designer

[Mason M]

Saving a file stored on a remote server, mounted with sshfs-win (https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win), crashed Designer, and I can't start it back up again. Each time I try, a new Designer.exe process is created that hangs (the window is greyed and nonresponsive) and can't be terminated. When I try to launch Photo, I get a message saying it "cannot communicate with other Affinity apps".

What application are you using?

Designer.

Are you using the latest release version?

Yes.

Can you reproduce it?

I don't know, because I can't reboot my computer right now (I'm running a job that won't finish for a few hours).

Does it happen for a new document? If not can you upload a document that shows the problem?

Same as above.

[Lee D]

@Mason M Welcome to the forums.

While we do some testing can you try the latest V2 beta and see if this behaves any different. As some changes have been made to how files are saved. As our developers do recommend saving locally.

The message you're getting when opening Photo may also relate to the way sshfs is configured.  As it does require additional components to be installed which may be having an effect on the communication between our apps. 

**Update**

I've just gone through the process as outlined in the Github post you linked to. I've been able to map a drive and save and load from a remote server using our apps without any issues. It also doesn't seem to have any effect on the communication between our apps. The issue may be unique to your setup in someway.

Out of interest what is the remote server running?

 

[walt.farrell]

10 hours ago, Mason M said:

Each time I try, a new Designer.exe process is created that hangs (the window is greyed and nonresponsive) and can't be terminated. When I try to launch Photo, I get a message saying it "cannot communicate with other Affinity apps".

If you have an Affinity app that is hung, you will probably need to terminate it using Task Manager before you can start another Affinity app.

Once you have terminated any of the hung apps, you might try this to get things running again:

1. Press and keep pressing the Ctrl key while you start the app.
2. When you get the Clear dialog (which may require clicking on the app icon on the Windows Task bar), release Ctrl.
3. Uncheck everything except the second option, which will stop the app from trying to open your active files when it starts.
4. Click Clear or Reset (Sorry; I don't remember how it's labeled.)

[Mason M]

Thanks! The remote machine is running Ubuntu Server 22.04. I'm using Designer to make illustrations for a project that also has procedurally generated figures and the code for those needs to target Linux. The illustrations are part of the documentation, so they're bundled with the code in a Git repository, which motivates my kind of funky setup.

I rebooted and I haven't had any issues since, so hopefully that was just a quirk of my setup. This is actually my first time using sshfs-win, so it's certainly possible I didn't set it up quite right.

[Mason M]

@walt.farrell Hi, Thanks for the tips! The issue in this case though was that I couldn't terminate Designer.exe, using either the task manager or the command line (even in admin mode). Things worked fine after rebooting though.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

It's odd that Task Manager couldn't terminate it; I don't think I've ever seen that.

Glad you have it working now, and thanks for mentioning that GitHub project; I can think of some uses for it