Not a good beta update for me - slow program startup and pencil lag

[Jonopen]

1.5.0.11, Windows 10

 

Three things have changed for me in this latest beta.

 

1) The installation took around eight minutes and required a restart. This was mainly due to the requirement for other software (Microsoft .NET) to be installed. I would estimate previous installations have taken less than two minutes. 

 

2) Affinity Designer now takes over 15 seconds to start. Previously it took about 5 or 6 seconds.

 

3) I am now experiencing significant lag when using the pencil tool. I can almost draw (with a Wacom pen) a wiggly line from one side of the page to the other before anything starts to appear on the page. Other graphics apps running on same pc system are ok when a similar test exercise is carried out.

 

 

 

[Jon P]

Hi Jonopen,

 

I've just given our Wacom pen a test and it seems fine, do you also get the lag if you don't use the wacom pen?

 

Can you just try giving the program a soft reset by holding down the CTRL key and running the program up, if it still seems to be behaving slow can you attach or PM me the following file: "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Serif\Affinity Designer\1.0 (Beta)\SystemInformation.txt"

 

Thanks

[benthai]

1) The installation took around eight minutes and required a restart. This was mainly due to the requirement for other software (Microsoft .NET) to be installed. I would estimate previous installations have taken less than two minutes.

2) Affinity Designer now takes over 15 seconds to start. Previously it took about 5 or 6 seconds.

Yeap I thought exactly the same when I first launched the new beta...

[Mark Ingram]

Does it take that long each time? Or it just took 15 seconds after doing a fresh install?

[KoBu]

I also lived the experience by installing net.framework 4.6.2. Some minutes nothing happened. But no problem by installing the pure ADwin.

My ADwin (1.5.0.11, Windows 10) starts in about 6 seconds. (Windows started, then ADwin started)

[adi]

For me a cold launch for Affinity Designer 1.5.0.11 is about 15 seconds, then about 9 seconds for any subsequent run during the day

[Jonopen]

Hi Jonopen,

 

I've just given our Wacom pen a test and it seems fine, do you also get the lag if you don't use the wacom pen?

 

Can you just try giving the program a soft reset by holding down the CTRL key and running the program up, if it still seems to be behaving slow can you attach or PM me the following file: "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Serif\Affinity Designer\1.0 (Beta)\SystemInformation.txt"

 

Thanks

 

Hi Mark

 

I've only got a track pad on my system so it was slightly difficult to compare (finger vs pen), but there was still definitely a slight delay before the line got going. I'm saying all this in the past tense because since doing the soft reset there is now no lag.  ​Something I also discovered before the reset - it was only the first few line strokes that had the lag. As I continued drawing further lines the pen became quicker and more fluid.

 

Also good news - the program now starts much quicker (about 6 or 7 seconds).

 

Panic over! :)

[Jonopen]

I should have mentioned in my last post, this dialogue box popped up when starting up AD following the soft reset. 

[Roberto1972]

Wow, I wish it took 9s to start up: over here 19-28 seconds for a restart (measuring twice: different numbers but both restarts) and yes, the installation took like forever.

I don't experience real slow down when drawing pencil or brush strokes either with mouse or pen. There's some but acceptable.

I do have a general experience of all-over slow down, though: looks like everything takes some time. But now I did some random tests performance seemed ok. Perhaps things only are slower at the start and when more and more features have been used they have been 'cached' or so.

A consistent annoying slow down occurs with e.g. copy and paste: takes much longer than in any other program.

 

Roberto

[Alfred]

Wow, I wish it took 9s to start up

 

Me too, Roberto! It takes 8 or 9 seconds just to reach the point where the build number in the splash screen is redrawn smaller, and then another 8 or 9 seconds until the application window appears. It was slightly faster a couple of builds ago.

[Mark Ingram]

The startup is actually much faster now, the problem previously was that the splash screen didn't show until much later in the startup procedure (giving a false sense of speediness). 

 

Behind the splash screen it will load all the fonts in the system and all of the stored properties in the application (e.g. brushes, assets, styles, etc), so the more of those, the slower the startup.

 

On my laptop (Core i7) it takes 6 seconds to start up. 4 until the label changes, 2 after (though note that in 1.5.0.14 we fixed the resizing font label on the splash screen ;)).

[Checkmate]

I'm getting 20-25 second startup time generally on 2 different laptops (one an i3 with SSD, the other an i5 with HDD). As a comparison, my i3 laptop actually reboots from cold in in 26 seconds....

[MikeW]

The startup is actually much faster now, the problem previously was that the splash screen didn't show until much later in the startup procedure (giving a false sense of speediness). 

 

Behind the splash screen it will load all the fonts in the system and all of the stored properties in the application (e.g. brushes, assets, styles, etc), so the more of those, the slower the startup.

 

On my laptop (Core i7) it takes 6 seconds to start up. 4 until the label changes, 2 after (though note that in 1.5.0.14 we fixed the resizing font label on the splash screen ;)).

 

My laptop takes 1 minute 20 seconds from clicking the icon to having responsive menus. On the other hand, AI takes a skosh less than 30 seconds. Same fonts (293 active fonts). This is a fresh install, no additional assets, styles, etc.). Heck, InkScape, the pig that it is, starts faster...

 

And I wouldn't really care about the start time if the application was more responsive  ;)

[Mark Ingram]

...if the application was more responsive  ;)

 

How do you mean? When the splash screen is visible, obviously you can't interact with the application, but once that's disappeared, and the main window is visible, it should be immediately available and "responsive"? What are you seeing? Can you provide a video?

[MikeW]

Hello Mark,

 

I mean once the application is running. I find AD less responsive/quick than other vector design applications on the same computer as regards actually adding/manipulating content. This is especially true the more elements that are in the design.

 

Mike

[Mark Ingram]

OK, that's probably because we render the full content of the document, even when dragging objects, in real time, whereas other applications cheat by not drawing objects when dragging (Illustrator), or by drawing the objects on top of the document when dragging (DrawPlus).

[MikeW]

Well, I have no idea what an application like XDP is doing (other than likely using a cached bitmap representation) of an object moving, but whatever it is doing is far, far more responsive. Even the act of drawing a simple rectangle is far more responsive in XDP than AD.

 

I imagine there are still ways of optimizing the code behind the scenes. Quark, when it first came out with the hi-res full-time preview and high-zoom factor, was also slower than it "ought" to have been. Two version later it is quite responsive (incl. on this laptop).

[MikeW]

Here's something related to start time. With Task Manager set to always on top and watching the CPU/disk activity columns, I note that AD barely hits 58% CPU during start up. Conversely, XDP, which starts in seconds (less than 10 after a cold reboot), uses 95% or so of the CPU.

 

Drawing a rectangle out in XDP hits 8% or so CPU activity. AD uses a whopping 59% CPU before it settles back down.

 

Mike

[Mark Ingram]

Yes, we only fire up 1 extra thread during startup (mainly because things have to be done in order, so we can't trigger loads of threads to speed things up). If you have a quad core CPU, you won't see full usage.

 

Conversely, when drawing in the app, we use as much CPU as possible in order to render everything as fast as possible. 

[MikeW]

...

Conversely, when drawing in the app, we use as much CPU as possible in order to render everything as fast as possible. 

 

And yet more CPU cycles are not translating into faster on-screen draw speed compared to, well, any of the other 5 vector drawing applications I have installed. Not here at least.

 

I'll bow out of this discussion now as I cannot think of anything additional I can say.

[Dave_MW]

So I attempted to open Affinity and then Ai and see how long it took each.

 

Affinity was faster by like two seconds... Then I realized that Affinity is installed on my SSD while Ai is on my HDD.

 

I imagine Affinity would be much slower to open than Ai as it stands right now on windows.

[Mark Ingram]

Mike, like I say, it's because we draw in real time, and your other applications all fake it.

[MattP]

So... I'm getting a little tired of hearing that Designer's not as fast as this or that... so I did a screen recording with my phone. This video shows Designer, Xara Pro X365 and DrawPlus with the same file (the first SVG I tried) and I'm not left in any doubt which is faster.

 

Best of all is what happens when I actually look at my screen - Designer is the only one of these applications which is DPI-aware and as my screen is set to 200% scaling, that means Designer is actually drawing 4 times as much data as either of the other two (which draw one pixel for each of the four on the screen).

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Jonopen]

Thanks Matt for showing the video clip. That is a good comparison of speed.

 

I might be wrong but the lack of responsiveness that MikeW could be referring to, occurs when an object is selected and moved/dragged on the page, rather than when moving the whole page.

 

I've no way to easily demonstrate this, but I have tested AD against Illustrator CS2 and Xara PGD on the same laptop, and it's only noticeable with AD that there is a slight delay before the object moves and then judders whilst moving. The initial delay seems to occur when the context menu and, for example, the Effects panel are being activated/populated.

 

If an object, for example some 300pt Artistic text, is selected first, then moved, it moves more smoothly, without the initial slight delay, but it still not as smooth compared to the other two programmes.

 

A way I can easily see the difference in the smoothness of movement, is if I move the (non-maximised)AD programme window by it's title bar, it is really smooth, if I move an object on the page within the programme, it moves in steps and judders.

 

 

 

[MattP]

I'll post another video of moving one of the objects around on the document when I get back to the office on Tuesday. When I tried it earlier, Designer was quicker than Xara, but the fastest was DrawPlus - but that is doing a z-order-incorrect draw so is unfair. Remember again that Designer is doing 4 times more pixels than either of the others on the machine I was using, so the fact that it was still the fastest is pretty incredible, to be honest... hence why I'm amazed that it is appearing to be slower for some people? The back-end is clearly more than capable of outperforming anything else...

 

If it's genuinely slower at the same thing on a pure vector document that's non-trivial, then we have a bug - and that can be fixed. That's an important point, incidentally, that our strategy is not optimised for trivial tests - but that's because real documents aren't trivial by the time you need them to be performant...