Affinity Photo: hang (or half minute pause) on quit. My drive's fault?

[nickbatz]

Affinity Photo 1 & 2, same with all versions so far.
Mac Studio Max 64GB running latest Ventura, but same thing happened with previous macOS versions.

When I load and unload a lot of big files, I'm getting very long hangs when quitting the program. Usually that resolves by half a minute, sometimes it doesn't and I force quit.

My files are all on an external 4TB NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure. The actual drive is a Crucial P3+, but I understand it doesn't have a memory cache (I forget what kind of cache memory these drives have).

Here's the question: is the lack of cache responsible for this, i.e. is Affinity Photo cleaning up after itself? It seems excessive.

TIA

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, nickbatz said:

My files are all on an external 4TB NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure. The actual drive is a Crucial P3+, ...

Does the external drive have some activ set/activated sleep mode? Aka does it have to always wake first up after some time of being idle?

Due to the Affinity apps file system and often error prone behavior with external connected drives (SSDs, NAS, Cloud drives ...)  it's probably not the best to work directly on an external connected drive.

Other than that there have been lately somef reports about lame operation and memory huge consumption of Affinity apps under Mac Silicon and Ventura ...

 

[walt.farrell]

If you have a large amount of data on the clipboard, there have been reports of the applications taking a long time to clear it during close.

[thomaso]

9 hours ago, nickbatz said:

My files are all on an external 4TB NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure.

Does "all" mean that also your macOS user folder is stored on the external drive? Since the user folder includes your library folder with the Affinity system folders (autosave / temp) it might make a difference to cleanup these folders when closing the app after working with "big files", whereas this might not explain a delay of "half a minute", especially since, in my experience, the Affinity system folders in Finder view often appear to get cleaned up not when closing but when opening the app.

[nickbatz]

The system drive is internal, of course. 

[nickbatz]

9 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Does the external drive have some activ set/activated sleep mode? Aka does it have to always wake first up after some time of being idle?

Due to the Affinity apps file system and often error prone behavior with external connected drives (SSDs, NAS, Cloud drives ...)  it's probably not the best to work directly on an external connected drive.

No sleep mode. This is a very fast NVMe drive connected to a Thunderbolt 3 port.

 

I don’t understand why Affinity or any program would care whether you’re using an internal or external drive - or for that matter a partition or container. macOS is fine with that, and presumably Affinity’s temp files are on the system drive anyway. 
 

You may be right, but it seems like it the whole point of an operating system is to take care of that!

[v_kyr]

26 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

No sleep mode. This is a very fast NVMe drive connected to a Thunderbolt 3 port.

So then there shouldn't be any wake on delay from some ...being in powersaving mode..., as some of my external connected USB drives are using.

26 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

I don’t understand why Affinity or any program would care whether you’re using an internal or external drive - or for that matter a partition or container. macOS is fine with that, and presumably Affinity’s temp files are on the system drive anyway. 

It's not the OS per se here, as most other apps don't have problems here, but instead more how the Affinity apps themself handle files due to their incremental file format behavior, which is sometimes especially critical when working directly on external/remote file system connections. - If you search through the forum you will see many reported problems due to that.

 

 

[nickbatz]

8 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

If you have a large amount of data on the clipboard, there have been reports of the applications taking a long time to clear it during close.

I think that might be the culprit, because smaller pictures don't have this problem (for example if I just open something to check out and maybe add just a couple of adjustment layers).

 

Thanks.

[nickbatz]

52 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

It's not the OS per se here, as most other apps don't have problems here, but instead more how the Affinity apps themself handle files due to their incremental file format behavior, which is sometimes especially critical when working directly on external/remote file system connections. - If you search through the forum you will see many reported problems due to that.

I'm still scratching my head, because I've never seen a Mac program that cares where document files are stored - going back to the Mac Plus and my $650 30MB external hard drive.

But I'll search and see whether I find what you're talking about. Thanks.

[v_kyr]

3 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

But I'll search and see whether I find what you're talking about

Search after corrupted files and data lost in this external connections context!

[nickbatz]

Reopening this thread.

I'm still getting hangs when I quit after working on large files, requiring a force quit (that is, after about a minute I run out of patience and force quit).

Are there any suggested settings to avoid this? I'm not saving the undo history, so it's not that.

Mac Studio M1 Max, 64GB RAM - and Affinity Photo often uses a very big chunk of that RAM, which is fine. I have over 500GB of free space on the internal 4TB drive, so it's not that, and I can't imagine that it's going to virtual memory.

 

On 8/28/2023 at 1:13 PM, v_kyr said:

Search after corrupted files and data lost in this external connections context!

You can use internal or external drives on Macs and it makes no difference to the OS - leaving aside that the internal storage on Mac Studios has more bandwidth even than the external Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drive on my system. But using an external drive is irrelevant to file corruption. 

As it happens, I now have my picture files on the internal storage anyway. And the external drive (4TB Crucial P3+ in an Acasis TB405 enclosure) doesn't have onboard cache memory, so writing files is slightly slower than it could be. But that's not the culprit.

TIA