Publisher v1 slower/heavier than usual

[VirginiaL]

Hi you all,

maybe someone already asked about it, but I didn't find it.

Publisher v1 - windows 10 - is extremely slow. Especially when I write, a letter appears after some seconds. Unnerving. If you check the task manager, its process occupies 3 gb of memory.

What is it going on?

Thank you

[VirginiaL]

folly...

[GarryP]

If you keep any (non-trivial) software open for long periods of time there can often be a tendency for it to ‘bloat’ with various cached items, and similar, taking up memory as things are ‘kept close’ for quick use.

That’s not to mention memory leaks which can cause an application to ‘accidentally’ grow in memory use (and I’m not saying that is the case here).

Have you tried closing Publisher and then launching it again?

I would usually recommend closing most applications at least once a day, if possible, to help to ‘keep things fresh’.

Just for comparison, Publisher 1.10.6, on Windows, after launch, with no open documents, should use about 420MB of memory, maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more, depending on fonts etc.

Try launching Publisher, without opening any documents, and leaving it for five minutes or so.
If, by then, it is taking up more than 500MB of memory then you might need to look at figuring out how to reduce that footprint, and someone can probably help you with that.

[VirginiaL]

I have closed and switched on/off computer among these tests, but it was in the same way. I will try just opening and working on that soon without clicking on other windows.

Do you have some tips on cleaning cache? Thank you so much

[GarryP]

If you launch Publisher without creating a document, leaving it for a few minutes to get itself sorted ‘behind the scenes’, how much memory does it take up?

The caches I was talking about are the in-memory caches of the applications themselves and these are cleared down when the application is closed.

There will be other ‘cached’ things, such as font metrics and such forth, but I don’t know if we can access these without getting into the ‘guts’ of the application folders, which could cause problems.

My next recommendation would be to have a look to see how many fonts are installed on your system. If you have thousands (or even just hundreds on some systems) then that will probably cause a slow-down upon application launch as the software has to go through them all, finding their information, and checking to make sure they can be used. The more font information the more memory the application will take to store it.

Next I would look at Assets. If you have lots of Assets then that can cause launch slow-down also. You can export Assets to a folder on disk from where they can be imported later is necessary, so you only need to have the Assets ‘on-tap’ that you need for the job in hand.

I’m not sure if either of these things will help for general usage speeds but it’s worth trying to see if your application is, in itself, ‘bloated’ with all kinds of stuff that you might not be using before looking for other possible problems. A 'quick fix' may be all that is necessary.

Also, check your RAM Usage Limit, and Undo Limit in Settings/Performance. Setting these very high or very low could impact how quickly the software will respond under certain circumstances. On my 16GB machine I have Ram Usage Limit set to 8GB with an Undo Limit of 1024 and that works nicely for me with various other applications open.

If your machine RAM is small, e.g. 8GB or less then, if you need to work on large documents often, I would recommend at least thinking about adding more RAM, if possible.

[VirginiaL]

Hi Garry, thank you very much!

Experiment concluded. At the beginning of its opening it was requiring 800 mb of memory. After few minutes it is 1,1 gb - but it seems stabilized. Without documents opened.

I will check about fonts - I don't use Assets (or maybe I do not know what they are... but I simply apply graphics, master pages, and external links as images)

Ram 16 gb.

 

thank you

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information.

1.1GB seems a bit high to me, with no documents open, so it’s worth having a dig around and seeing what you can find.

Even if you have never used Assets it’s possible that you could have installed some as part of a ‘freebie’ and just never used them.
You can open the Assets Panel – via menu “View → Studio → Assets” on V1 – and see if there is anything installed.
If there is, you can Export them to somewhere safe and then remove them from the application which should, at the very least, make launch a bit quicker; you can always import them again if you need them.

As for removing fonts, that would need to be taken carefully as some fonts are used by various applications on your machine; removing a needed font could cause all kinds of problems.
It’s often difficult to tell at first glance, by their names, which fonts can be removed, and it’s easy to remove something that’s required, so you might like to search the forums (or elsewhere) for information about font management applications.

Another thing you could try, for general usage speeds, is (in Settings/Performance) switching Graphics Acceleration OFF/ON and/or trying different settings in that section, but that’s something which someone else would have to help with.

[VirginiaL]

Hi Garry, thank you so much for your research in this.

No assets as attached. Now I opened Blender and working on that and Blender is almost 2gb, against 300 mb of Affinity (always empty).

 

[henryanthony]

@VirginiaL Did you use Shut down or Restart? Restart should be used when installing updates/software and to hopefully resolve any errors. If the computer has frozen or is giving off some other error, you should use Restart rather than Shut Down, even though it may seem to you that Shut Down would be a more complete option.

I recently had a similar problem with Affinity Photo V1 after installing Discord. Any mouse click or key stroke had a delay. Removed Discord and all was back to normal. I did not investigate if Discord was affecting any other applications.

Just FYI, I don't have Publisher but Affinity Photo is using 240 MB of memory at start up.

[VirginiaL]

Many days are gone, and I used both, restart and shut down. Now trying with Affinity Photo with no documents open: 600 mb at start up, without waiting minutes.

Mystery...

 

ps: 1 gb. No docs. No heavier apps open

 

[henryanthony]

@VirginiaL FYI, with Blender and Affinity Photo opened with default files: AP: 250 MB; Blender: 215 MB