Affinity photo 2.6.2 allocates full system ressources, functions will not work

[Oliver S.]

Hello,

something went wrong with affinity photo in the last two versions. The app takes most of system ressources and works not as expected. So i reinstalled MacOS 10.15.7 again with all applications including Affinity programms.

Nearby every update of V2 went wrong, after restart the applications they were not starting again (photo, publisher, designer). So a complete download and reinstall was neccessary are the solution.

MacBookPro9,2, Dual-Core Intel Core i7, 2,9 GHz
MacOS 10.15.7

After the reinstalling i tried to make a HDR Stack with 5 NEF files wich took 30 minutes (?!). One with 122 macro files took over 4 hours ..... . Denoising the local stored picture as *.afphoto showed no reactions, same on every filter level.
Loading 10 files for a focus stack occures a complete application shutdown.
Instead of doing its work affinity photo overtook nearby the complete the system ressources an cretes a lot of hot air.

I will provoke this behaviour of the affinity photo app again and will post the screenshots from the systems. Sadly no report was generated by the OS.

Dear developers, if you phase out the support of MacOS 10.15 please let this all users know.

regards
Oliver

 

[NotMyFault]

If you overload your truck exceeding its maximum capacity - is it a bug in your truck?

 

Every app processing huge amount of image data using cpu, ram and gpu heavy computations has some limits where it will slow down.

those limits are not documented, but in case you run into such situation the best course of action is to carefully measure the avalable performance and plan ahead how much time and RAM is required. It may help trying to reduce load by splitting into phases and save ressources by rasterizing or export to a bitmap file.

1. preprocess raw files, and export to tiff or other formats
2. check resolution. Affinity can process a certain amount of pixel / sec. Everything above 24 mpix gets slow. Double the pixel count in one dimension, you get 4 times the runtime at least.
3. ram is a factor once you exceed available physical ram. Use process monitor / task manager or similar tools to check. If you consume all physical ram, you need a beefier PC or reduce demand by lowering resolution, bit depth, number of filters, whatever is possible.

fyi: I know a company used multiple virtual servers with 6000 GByte RAM and 256 cpu for some tasks because it is required. Those system cost >100.000€ per month of usage.

 

That aside, there are of course open bugs in Affinity apps. To distinguish, we would need example file and used macros trying to reproduce.

[NotMyFault]

I suggest to downscale images for a test by factor 64 (8x8) and measure the runtime and observe ram and disk usage.

the take those numbers times 64. or use a PC with 64 times cpu, gpu, ram, ssd raid.

[Oliver S.]

hello,

thanks for your tips but these dosn't help. Until the last version it worked, Now i've to reinstall affinity photo every 2nd day.

Is the somebody who can analyse the crash protocols and solve this problem?  Some other applications had a problem with run out certificates. After replacing they work fine again - only affinity photo make troubles, designer and publisher doesn't have any problem.

 

Affinity Photo 2.6.2 Crashes.txt

[Bound by Beans]

On 4/6/2025 at 10:41 AM, NotMyFault said:

If you overload your truck exceeding its maximum capacity - is it a bug in your truck?

Only one thing is worse than internet memes, and that's internet analogies. They only serve to highlight that a bad point was bad to begin with. It's not that simple. In many areas, Affinity clearly shows signs of being clumsily designed to consume computer resources freely, without any particular strategic or architectural measures to keep resource usage down or stabilize it during runtime. Do something just slightly beyond normal, simple complexity, and you start to see the cracks in programs with poor architecture and performance management.

I have used many, many programs that are clearly built on solid architecture, where the companies behind them obviously had a performance strategy, and where resource consumption is carefully managed, especially during heavy operations. You can almost hear the architect earning their performance bonus.

Programs that collapse under simple tasks like handling 5 or 10 files — tasks that were manageable 25 years ago on laptops running Photoshop CS — are simply poorly developed and designed. Who pays the price? The customer. And once again, the forums offer poor answers. That’s when the circle of poor quality truly completes itself.

Hire the right people, know what you're doing, and ask the right customers.

[nickbatz]

On 4/28/2025 at 2:00 PM, Bound by Beans said:

Only one thing is worse than internet memes, and that's internet analogies

Actually car (or truck) analogies are worse.

But yes, you can bring Affinity Photo to its knees with very large pictures when you have dozens of layers and draw from many other pictures, etc. I ran into that with a mural-sized picture (24" x about 12' @ 300 DPI) recently, and I had to Merge Visible and then delete everything below before saving to create a new file to continue working on... I think five times.

Usually I just do a Merge Visible, group the layers below it into a folder that I turn off. This picture is just too large; every action would take forever, and saving took five years each time.

So those are my workarounds, if that helps.

That's in an M1 Max Mac Pro with 64GB and 32 graphics cores, using the very fast internal storage. As an experiment I opened the same picture in my M4 Pro (14 cores, 20 graphics cores) MacBook Pro with 48GB, with the same result - but I didn't have my big monitor connected to it, so this was just a test.

However, I've admitted before to being a walking edge case and I'm not ready to blame the program. I'm pretty sure that the PowerMac G3 I was using 25 years ago would have had quite a bit more trouble.

[Oliver S.]

@Bound by Beans yes your colcusion is right

But if older versions shouldn't be supportet anymor it is fine to have a notofication or release letter wich shows that. s*** can happen in every development. Every day experiance in collaboration work on github every day .... . If you know that there#s something not ok in a production release than it's cool to give a release letter that next version is on the way with better features and stability. doesn't solve the bugs but will help to calm the user down.

I know about the old hardware and the borders of system ressources. But 2.6.2 is not as stable at it seems. A neccessary reinstall after every 3rd start and  set the fans to maximum speed during starting the app .... that's not a normal system behaviour.
To avoid problems a friend tested my RAM's on a professional testbench and they were ok, cpu seems ok and does't produce random errors during runtime.

So i tried a workaround in using my much more potent windows computer for the stacking and the old mac for color adjustment. But replacing this old mac occures to replace a 64" HP photo solvent ink printer, Nikon Coolscan 9000 and a X-rite calibrator as well.

Installed 2.6.3 suite complete and it looks much better than 2.6.2

[Bound by Beans]

I simply don’t think Serif realizes how poor Photo is compared to its competitors — and releasing bad updates on top of that doesn’t help. The ordeals you're unfortunately going through — I want no part of that. I might already be on my final version of Affinity: 2.5.7.