Questions about speeding up AP - settings?

[nickbatz]

Yes there are other threads, sorry about that, and I could experiment. But I'm hoping the brain trust will have some suggestions to save me time and effort.

So I'm working on a picture that has brought Affinity Photo to its knees on my M1 Max Mac Studio w/64GB and 32-core graphics, with a good half TB of free space on it's shriekingly fast 4TB internal drive.

It's clear that I'm pushing things - that part is no mystery.

To (sorry) paint the picture, the file is about 8.3GB - as in 8300MB. So far I have something like 115 layers, and for the first time I'm using a lot of masks rather than copy/pasting fragments. This picture draws from at least 20 others, and each fragment has an HSL adjustment at a minimum. Before I do anything (causing it to cache) it uses over 20GB of memory, and it's gone as low as having only about 8GB free (leaving aside that I also have standard things open - browser, word processor, email, text, etc.).

So I know I'm going to have to do some Merging Visible and turning off layers.

But... 

What would Ghandi do to speed up the program?

TIA

 

 

[nickbatz]

To clarify, this isn't the first time I've used masks, of course, I'm just using far more of them than I have in the past, the idea being to leave myself an escape route if I don't like what I've done.

[Aurea Ratio]

4 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

What would Ghandi do to speed up the program?

It's downright innovative in my book to bring Gandhi into IT optimization!

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

What would Ghandi do to speed up the program?

Probably practicing Satyagraha and praying to Vishnu.

Other than that, he would probably also make continious backups (which is mandatory here), merging levels that are already set in stone, avoiding memory-intensive and performance-reducing functions as much as possible. Further closing other actually unneeded running apps, in order to get their occupied memory back for the task and the cores occupied by those running.

[nickbatz]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Probably practicing Satyagraha and praying to Vishnu.

Other than that, he would probably also make continious backups (which is mandatory here), merging levels that are already set in stone, avoiding memory-intensive and performance-reducing functions as much as possible. Further closing other actually unneeded running apps, in order to get their occupied memory back for the task and the cores occupied by those running.

Continuous backups, absolutely - I have local incremental Time Machine backups (alternating on two drives once an hour) and cloud backups every night.

All the programs I have running are needed. One reason I have 64GB of RAM is that 1994 was 30 years ago, and today I keep the programs I use all day long open. Another is that I also use music programs that stream samples off the drives and need a lot of RAM. But I don't usually leave them open when I'm using Affinity Photo and v.v.

Oh, and I'm not running out of RAM - I've never seen less than 8GB of RAM left - that's the total amount base models come with! -  although who knows what virtual memory it has going on. Hopefully none.

Anyway, it sounds like there aren't any magic settings that I missed. This is the first time I've run into this issue with Affinity Photo, but as I said, it's also the first time I've used so many masks rather than cutting things out.

[nickbatz]

Following up - the simple solution: merge visible so I have a working picture, then group everything below it and turn off the group.

That's the best of both words - I have all the original elements to go back to and tweak, and Affinity Photo doesn't ask for a recovery break every time I click the mouse.