Affinity Photo 2.4.2/Sonoma 14.4.1 holding onto more RAM on quit than Ventura

[nickbatz]

What the title says. I just updated to Sonoma 14.4.1 from Ventura, and Affinity Photo consistently doesn't want to relinquish all the memory it grabbed.

Example: I just opened a small image, quit Affinity Photo, and I now have 43.53GB available.

That number means absolutely nothing in the abstract, but for comparison I'd expect to have over 50GB left.

Mac Studio M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 32-core graphics.

[walt.farrell]

38 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

Example: I just opened a small image, quit Affinity Photo, and I now have 43.53GB available.

Just to confirm, how did you quit Affinity Photo?

[nickbatz]

26 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Just to confirm, how did you quit Affinity Photo?

I didn't force-quit, if that's what you're asking. Whether or not I save first doesn't seem to make a difference.

I've also noticed that it uses more RAM than it used to from the beginning.

If I could pull off pretending to know what I'm talking about, I'd bandy about words like "memory leak." But I don't.

[nickbatz]

So it's not every file, which means something else is going on.

I'll see whether I can find anything consistent to report. The most obvious offender is a TIFF I got from a friend to print for her. It was created in Photoshop.

[walt.farrell]

10 hours ago, nickbatz said:

I didn't force-quit, if that's what you're asking.

No; sorry.

I don't reallly know the terminology yet, but in macOS there are things you can do that appear to cause the application to quit, but still leave it running in the Dock, but with the UI closed. So, please explain what you did to quit. For example, from the menu, Affinity Photo 2 > Quit (or is it Exit?) would definitely do it.

[nickbatz]

10 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

No; sorry.

I don't reallly know the terminology yet, but in macOS there are things you can do that appear to cause the application to quit, but still leave it running in the Dock, but with the UI closed. So, please explain what you did to quit. For example, from the menu, Affinity Photo 2 > Quit (or is it Exit?) would definitely do it.

It's just regular Quit.

You can have programs running with their windows hidden (or on a separate desktop), in which case they remain active in the Dock. That's no different from Windows.

I always have multiple programs open - email, a browser, messages, the software for my audio interface, the program that monitors my UPS, often a word processor, often some music software... and there's nothing abnormal about that.

But Affinity Photo isn't always releasing all its RAM under macOS Sonoma when you quit it, and it was under Ventura.

It does seem to have something to do with specific files, though.

[Dan C]

Hi @nickbatz,

On 4/3/2024 at 10:37 PM, nickbatz said:

Affinity Photo isn't always releasing all its RAM under macOS Sonoma when you quit it, and it was under Ventura.

AFAIK, there is no difference with how the Affinity app itself handles RAM/memory management between Sonoma and Ventura - any differences will be made by Apple under the hood of the OS.

It's expected for the Affinity apps not to relinquish control of used memory when the application is still open, provided it is not being required by other applications etc.

However the app should always release any used memory once it has been fully Quit (as you've mentioned on macOS 'Close' can actually leave the application running in the background and therefore the memory may not be cleared).

You can use Activity Monitor on macOS to track the hardware usage of apps, and you should find that after the Affinity app is Quit the app no longer appears within this list. Provided the app is not listed here after being quit, this confirms the Affinity app is no longer running and the Affinity code no longer has control over your macs memory.

If you're finding that not all of the 'available memory' seems to be returning, but the Affinity app is not listed in the Activity Monitor, then this is out of our control and completely dependant on macOS itself.

On 4/3/2024 at 10:37 PM, nickbatz said:

It does seem to have something to do with specific files, though.

If you believe there are issues with Affinity handling certain files, can you please attach a copy of these files here for me to test further? Note if these are image files, please provide them within the .ZIP format as otherwise the upload process to the forums may change the exact behaviour experienced with the files.

Many thanks in advance.

[nickbatz]

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

Hi @nickbatz,

AFAIK, there is no difference with how the Affinity app itself handles RAM/memory management between Sonoma and Ventura - any differences will be made by Apple under the hood of the OS.

I don't doubt it.

 

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

It's expected for the Affinity apps not to relinquish control of used memory when the application is still open, provided it is not being required by other applications etc.

However the app should always release any used memory once it has been fully Quit (as you've mentioned on macOS 'Close' can actually leave the application running in the background and therefore the memory may not be cleared).

Of course.

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

You can use Activity Monitor on macOS to track the hardware usage of apps, and you should find that after the Affinity app is Quit the app no longer appears within this list. Provided the app is not listed here after being quit, this confirms the Affinity app is no longer running and the Affinity code no longer has control over your macs memory.

Will check next time.

 

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

 

If you believe there are issues with Affinity handling certain files, can you please attach a copy of these files here for me to test further? Note if these are image files, please provide them within the .ZIP format as otherwise the upload process to the forums may change the exact behaviour experienced with the files.

Many thanks in advance.

Thanks Dan.

I can't send you my files, but I'll see what I can do.

[walt.farrell]

On 4/3/2024 at 5:37 PM, nickbatz said:

It's just regular Quit.

As a primarily-Windows user, I see two actions that I think of as Quit, but which are different.

1. Clicking the red stoplight icon "quits" the UI, but leaves the application active in the dock and in memory.
2. Using <Application name> > Quit (e.g., Affinity Photo 2 > Quit) from the menu, though, actually quits the application and removes it from memory. 

There's no equivalent of the red stoplight in Windows, and I've seen that confuse some Mac users here, who think they've quit the application when they've only closed the UI.

From your description, I wonder if that is sometimes what you're seeing, too. (Of course, if you're a long-time Mac user you probably know all this already, but as I say it has confused some users here and it's still something that gets me sometimes  )

[nickbatz]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

From your description, I wonder if that is sometimes what you're seeing, too. (Of course, if you're a long-time Mac user you probably know all this already, but as I say it has confused some users here and it's still something that gets me sometimes  )

Yeah, I'm not just closing the window, I'm quitting the program. Thanks though.

Interestingly, I haven't seen the same behavior since posting here, so this could just have been a glitch - although I did restart and run Disk Utility just for good measure.

Also, while I haven't booted my new Windows machine (a 2009 custom one running Windows 7  ) for a couple of years - let alone any of my stack of P4s with XP - but actually I remember it being pretty easy to make the mistake you're talking about in Windows too. You click the — to move windows to the taskbar, but usually closing the window quits the program.

What could be confusing people is that some Mac programs, typically utilities such as System Preferences and the calculator, do quit when you close their window.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, nickbatz said:

but actually I remember it being pretty easy to make the mistake you're talking about in Windows too. You click the — to move windows to the taskbar, but usually closing the window quits the program.

A Windows user has the — icon to Minimize the Window. The equivalent on macOS is the Yellow traffic light icon. This is not the same as the Red traffic light icon, as far as I know, which (I think) closes the UI and the active document.

A Windows user also has the X icon to Quit the application. This is also not the same as the Red traffic light on macOS, which does not quit the application.

And the Windows user has an X icon on a document tab, to close that tab. This is basically the Red traffic light icon, I think, but only for an open document. 

There is no Windows equivalent of the Red traffic light that closes the UI and the document, as far as I know, but leaves the application running.

But as you're not actively a Windows user this is probably not very relevant

[nickbatz]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But as you're not actively a Windows user this is probably not very relevant

It still doesn't hurt to know.

Off-topic alert:

I never really worked on Windows, I just had those machines dedicated to streaming sample libraries in my music project studio. When that was new, the big limitation was RAM access, so you needed 2-3 machines to have everything you wanted cued up and ready to play. While my Windows 7 PC has 24GB of RAM, the XP machines of 20 years ago could only load about 1.5GB of instruments into the required head-start RAM buffers, and you had to do some tweaks to load even that much.

Hans Zimmer (prominent film composer) had at least 12 of those machines in every room, probably more.

PCs have one big advantage: you can put together the exact machine, no more no less, to do what you need. For example, you don't need a powerful graphics card for this application.

In these days of 64-bit computing, that's all water under the bridge. I have 64GB in my Mac, which is all I need (for both music and art), but there are people who still complain that 192GB isn't enough.

(They typically mix several mic positions in their sampled orchestras - close up, back in the hall, etc., so each note you play triggers several notes and requires multiples of the computer resources it takes to trigger one.)