Download of built in assets takes forever

[Affinity-Inspiration]

Seems to be mostly in the Windows versions.

Downloading the Assetts takes forever, and you can’t shut the app until it completes.

I had to restart, go to accounts and watch downloads, then when it finished I could close the app. Seems to be in all 3. Mac and iOS are ok. Quite fast.

[walt.farrell]

What kind of machine are you using on Windows and on macOS? And what kind of disk for the user data saved by the application (Settings, etc.)?

I've noticed it being slow on Windows, too, but there is a lot of I/O involved, so the disk will certainly be a part of it. My assets.propcol file, for example, is just over 5GB, which takes a lot of reading and rewriting to download and apply all the assets.

[Affinity-Inspiration]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

What kind of machine are you using on Windows and on macOS? And what kind of disk for the user data saved by the application (Settings, etc.)?

I've noticed it being slow on Windows, too, but there is a lot of I/O involved, so the disk will certainly be a part of it. My assets.propcol file, for example, is just over 5GB, which takes a lot of reading and rewriting to download and apply all the assets.

I’m not sure if I’m talking about the right thing here. It's all the extras that can be downloaded from the My Account window.

Once one app is done the others seem to use them as well. But if you try and close the app before it's all downloaded it just sits there and gives the appearance of being locked up. Which it's not. 
if.... you open My Account to start with, you can watch the progress. THEN... YOU CAN wait for it to finish and then close the app.

This only happens once with essentially a clean install. And only with one of the three apps. 
I've only had an issue on one windows 11 platform I have. I've had the Mac and iOS running for years.

By the way, I'm not complaining rather letting people know it's not dead. It's just slow. And only once.

I do see a lot of people saying "OMG, it keeps locking up!"  That could be part of it. Sometimes nothing happens when downloads are happening. Very few people have fiber connections. Including me! 

[Affinityconfusesme]

I had this issue yesterday and I shut down program from the task manager because it could not be closed otherwise.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, Affinity-Inspiration said:

I’m not sure if I’m talking about the right thing here. It's all the extras that can be downloaded from the My Account window.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. The files being downloaded are large, and reading the .propcol files and updating them takes a lot of I/O.

As far as I know all you can do is be patient, and let it finish.

(And it also seems to take a long time on my MacBook Air, too, but I haven't tried to time the operation to get a good comparison.

[Affinity-Inspiration]

On 2/29/2024 at 5:14 PM, walt.farrell said:

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. The files being downloaded are large, and reading the .propcol files and updating them takes a lot of I/O.

As far as I know all you can do is be patient, and let it finish.

(And it also seems to take a long time on my MacBook Air, too, but I haven't tried to time the operation to get a good comparison.

Thanks Walt. 

What would be nice is that process being stuffed into the background to run when the app is opened, starting from where it left off for instance so the app can be closed.

As it stands, the app can't be closed until its finished,  and there is no messaging to let the user know that there is a really  really long process taking place, and it could take hours for the app to actually close.

Fortunately, it doesn't happen very often. Once per install, I think. But it's disconcerting when it does.

A red stop sign could be displayed, with a message saying "Don't close this program until background downloading has completed, and this sign turns Green"

Easy.