Snapping causes Text tools performance problems

[Raptosauru5]

I am aware that there are some performance problems with the text tools for quite a while now. Hopefully this may help the devs to get closer to solving laggy text tool problems.

I am demonstrating a test with many texts on this video (apologies for a bad video cropping, my first time...):

As you can see, just having the Text tool selected causes a huge application lag. And my tower is quite overkill for the task! Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 10GB, 32GB RAM.

I am demonstrating that the snapping dot is lagging behind the cursor and the whole canvas lags when panning the view when holding any Text tool.

I discovered this lag is caused by the Snapping tool, apparently doing some crazy calculations when turned on.

Strangely, only Text tools do this. The other tools have no problem.

 

Hopefully this can help discover the main core of this problem.

Thanks for your hard work! Your software is a blessing!

[NathanC]

Hi @Raptosauru5,

Any chance you could send over the document used in your recording so we can confirm it can be replicated in this scenario? If you could also send a screenshot your app Performance preferences that would be great.

Many thanks!

[Raptosauru5]

@NathanC Of course:

TextLagTest.afdesign

[NathanC]

Thanks @Raptosauru5,

It's very likely being caused by your snapping candidate list being set to 'All Layers' in your snapping options, having this enabled with that many thousands of objects/candidates on the document will be performing some intensive calculations within the app which will put stress on CPU, even for a 5900X. Try changing the snapping candidates to 'Candidate list' and you should hopefully see the performance levels go back to normal.

While testing this and comparing on a Mac, I did find that with the text tool simply selected (No snapping or objects selected) the app was responding considerably slower when compared to having the move tool selected so it's evident that there is some performance impact on larger/object heavy documents, so i'll be getting this logged with the developers.

 

[Raptosauru5]

@NathanC Thanks for the tip! 

The 'Candidate list' works great. I red more about it in detail here: https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/DesignAids/snapping.html?title=Snapping

And I think I will start using it from now on, because I like that I can hover over objects of interest and they will become candidates and there can be multiple of them!

 

I should have mentioned that the snapping also happens across Artboards which might have caused performance drops as well. As an App UI designer, I currently have around 50 artboards and the snapping would sometimes choose to snap to some object very far away crossing multiple Artboards. I think Snapping options should include "Ignore other Artboards" toggle, because I would keep it ON most of the time. This could solve a lot of problems for the users.

 

18 hours ago, NathanC said:

While testing this and comparing on a Mac, I did find that with the text tool simply selected (No snapping or objects selected) the app was responding considerably slower when compared to having the move tool selected so it's evident that there is some performance impact on larger/object heavy documents, so i'll be getting this logged with the developers.

I can confirm this on Windows as well. This is a topic I see everywhere on forums. There is something going on with performance of Texts in general!

 

Thanks for your care! Affinity is among the best things that happened to the Design industry! 😊👍