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Memory full crash in Affinity Designer for Mac


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I am running MacOS Sierra 10.12.2 and using Affinity Designer 1.5.4

 

I made a very silly mistake in that I got so carried away with the design that I forgot to save until I had filled the memory buffer to a point when Designer will not let me save the file. It offer the File/Save window and when I press the blue Save button it turns white and the filename greys out and everything locks. If I do a Force Quit then the file will restore but the same problem happens again and I am totally locked.

 

The problem is that there are no warnings of the memory being full and no way of backing out of this situation without losing all my work, let alone saving a part of it.

 

I know that this is a basic mistake but there are no warnings and no way of saving the work. Such a pity when the product is so good otherwise. I suppose that I will have to lose everything and start again. 

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Are you sure this is not occurring because your hard drive is too full to save the file?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I've had a few unexpected file save issues with AP. Never had an issue with lack of disk space (i.e. using a huge NAS). Seems that AP sometimes "gets confused" when saving. Hard to pinpoint, but it does occasionally happen. MacBook Pro, 16 gb RAM, latest OS patches.

 

M

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I have no direct experience with this but I know from discussions with some 'Mac guru' types that many NAS systems do not always play well with OS X, including some that claim 100% compatibility. As I understand it (which is not very well), this is partially because internally they are simulating the 'native' HFS+ file system & can be confused by the intricacies of Core Storage or improperly implement the 'locks' (not the right term) that prevent multiple simultaneous accesses to files.

 

I have no idea if this has anything to do with your file save issues but the only ones I have ever experienced on my Mac while saving to the startup drive don't have anything to do with RAM -- as indicated below my iMac has only 8 GB of RAM, but even when I am working with very large files the only issues I have are slowdowns due to excessive paging to virtual memory.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 1 month later...

This had nothing at all to do with hard disk space as I had 1.6 Tb of available space.

 

What it had to do with was storage space on an 8Gb iMac. 

 

I eventually solved the problem using the restore the current file after closing Affinity Designer. It was a bit of a kludge but got me out of the problem. However, the Affinity team should be aware that there are no warnings that memory was becoming full or that there was an easy way to get out of the problem without a lot of heartache on the behalf of the user. It would be well worth testing before any new version is released.

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There should never be an issue with physical memory (RAM) becoming full with any OS X app other than slowdowns caused by the need to page data in memory out to disk & page it back in as needed, unless the disk is too full for that. In effect, the "memory buffer" is a combination of real & virtual memory, the latter being part of the 'backing store' on the drive. Only 'wired' memory cannot be paged out, & that is reserved for system level processes.

 

You should be able to see this using Activity Monitor. Click on the memory tab & check the "memory pressure" graph at the bottom of the window & the other info there. Even when working with huge document files, AD should never use all of the available memory -- OS X should never allow that to happen.

 

Also, note that there is a "RAM Usage Limit" you can set in Preferences > Performance. All this does is set a limit on when Affinity starts paging to disk (as mentioned in Matt's post here) -- it does not override the OS or otherwise allow Affinity to use more memory than is available for applications.

 

If Affinity crashed, there should be a crash report that explains (in hard to interpret for anyone other than a developer language) what was happening at the time of the crash. OS X can be configured to send crash reports to Apple & optionally to developers of an app that crashed. That can be helpful in determining the cause of the crash, but from time to time the staff have asked users to send them directly to them, either as an attachment to a post or in a PM.

 

Doing this may help resolve your crashing issues, but it very unlikely the cause is the app running out of memory.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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