Long app launch times with large number of installed fonts.

[MichaelG]

Dear Affinity Team,

First of all, thank you for this beta release. I have a few initial observations that I will post today.

I have noticed that the launch times for all Affinity apps is very long when a large number of fonts installed.

System: Fujitsu Celsius workstation. Core I7, 6 cores, 16Gb, SSD, Windows 10. (Not a slow machine by any means).

Fonts installed: 5857. (As these products are targeted at professional designers, I don't think this is an unrealistic number).

Measured launch times as follows...

Affinity Publisher:             4m 38s
PagePlus X9:                            14s
Adobe Photoshop CS6:          13s
Adobe Illustrator CS6:            26s
Adobe InDesign CS6:             25s
Affinity Photo 1.6.4:        8m 55s
Affinity Designer 1.6.4:   9m 5s

Each app was launched separately and then closed before launching the next. It can be seen that the Affinity apps take significantly longer to launch than the competition.

I would be grateful if you could pass this information to the Affinity Photo and Designer teams.

Thank you,
Mike.

[Petar Petrenko]

Launch times for Designer and Photo on my machine (see the footer) are about 40-50 seconds.

[walt.farrell]

For me, Publisher enumerates the fonts much faster than Photo or Designer do. I have hopes that the 1.7 versions of Photo and Designer will have the speed improvement that Publisher shows 

[Petar Petrenko]

Yes, Publisher launches faster than Photo and Designer.

[MichaelG]

Hi,

Since my original post I have upgraded both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer to V1.6.5.123. The launch times for those apps now are:

Affinity Photo 1.6.5:        8m 50s
Affinity Designer 1.6.5:   8m 50s

So not much change from the earlier versions. So the observations are:

• Affinity Publisher launches in approximately half the time that Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer do.
• Publisher is significantly slower to launch than either PagePlus X9 or any of the Adobe CS6 products on the same computer.

For what its worth, Adobe seems to build its own local font caches for each product. Each product folder has one or ore AbobeFNTnn.lst files, which are the local font caches. This may be why the Adobe apps can enumerate fonts very quickly. However, PagePlus X9 is also very quick to launch, and comparable to Adobe.

Thanks,
Mike.

 

[Petar Petrenko]

I think the Adobe has added some code for font cache on OS start, so it needs very little time to start any app of its own.

[walt.farrell]

22 hours ago, MichaelG said:

Fonts installed: 5857. (As these products are targeted at professional designers, I don't think this is an unrealistic number).

The general consensus so far has been that that Affinity's behavior with large numbers of fonts needs to be improved (which it has been with the 1.7 beta of Publisher). But in general it may remain true that one should use a font manager, and only keep the fonts needed for the specific projects one is actively working on installed. A good font manager allows browsing of, and dynamic activation/deactivation, of fonts as needed.

[Alfred]

22 hours ago, MichaelG said:

Fonts installed: 5857. (As these products are targeted at professional designers, I don't think this is an unrealistic number).

I don’t think that’s an unrealistic number of fonts to have. I’m not a professional designer, and I have twice that many; however, I don’t keep more than a few hundred permanently installed.

If you have a good font manager, as I do, it’s easy to load fonts as and when you need them. The Affinity apps automatically detect any changes and update the font cache accordingly.

[Fritz_H]

23 hours ago, MichaelG said:

Dear Affinity Team,

Fonts installed: 5857. (As these products are targeted at professional designers, I don't think this is an unrealistic number).

 

From my experience Pro-Users do not work like that.

They use Font-Management-Software to sort their Fonts and to create Font-Groups containing only those
fonts to be used with certain Projects or Clients. (helps to avoid using a not CD-conformal Typeface)

In the old days the Adobe Type Manager Deluxe was the de facto standard, some preferred Extensis SuiteCase.
Today, on Windows Google lists "NexusFont" and "FontBase".
LinoType offers FontExplorer X (€), SuiteCase is also still around among others..

 

kind regards

Fritz

[narrationsd]

I suspect it's all true about volume-experienced using font managers, and in fact I've been evaluating NexusFont and FontBase myself.

But I also suspect Affinity would benefit from having significantly cache-speeded opening on all apps, as this is the one thing that's uncomfortable right away for new/test/trial users. And because it's sure to be remarked by those doing reviews.

With a few hundred fonts, it seems to me that Publisher does open markedly faster than even new or beta versions of Designer and Photo -- so this is a very good step indeed.

Apparently not as effective fo thousands, but again that may point to sensible use of a font manager.

[MichaelG]

Hi,

Thanks to everyone for all the feedback. I accept that using a font manager may be a way to alleviate the prolonged launch times. I do actually have NexusFont installed so I may try that approach. However I have not used a font manager in the past to activate a only subset of fonts, simply because that has not been necessary for acceptable launch performance with my existing apps.

The fundamental fact here is that InDesign launches in under 30 seconds and Affinity Publisher Beta launches in approximately 4.5 minutes on the same computer. (Let's leave Photo and Designer out of it for the moment, as I suspect there is a common code base for many components). I make that an increase of approximately 900%. I therefore suspect that there are some optimization opportunities that have yet to be utilized, and others have alluded to this too. Remember also that PagePlus X9 launches in 14 seconds, and that is Serif technology.

My purpose in making this post was to make the developers aware, so they can consider whether or not this is an issue worthy of investing some development time. For me its not a show stopper,  just a moderate inconvenience.

Kind Regards,
Mike.

 

[Chris_K]

Hi MichaelG

We do innumerate fonts on app launch which does slow it down a bit. It has already been addressed slightly as you can see from the time publisher is half the time of the other two apps. the team will continue to find methods to reduce this time as we go on

[Petar Petrenko]

6 minutes ago, Chris_K said:

Hi MichaelG

We do innumerate fonts on app launch which does slow it down a bit. It has already been addressed slightly as you can see from the time publisher is half the time of the other two apps. the team will continue to find methods to reduce this time as we go on

Maybe cacheing during the OS start up? I guess Adobe does this.

[jörn-jören jörensön]

12 hours ago, Chris_K said:

Hi MichaelG

We do innumerate fonts on app launch which does slow it down a bit. It has already been addressed slightly as you can see from the time publisher is half the time of the other two apps. the team will continue to find methods to reduce this time as we go on

Good to know, thanks! : )

12 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Maybe cacheing during the OS start up? I guess Adobe does this.

Other users might see it differently, but I think it is terrible to have programs doing things at OS start (without letting the user know), just in case the program could get used later.

For me, I may be a little extreme here, this would be a reason not to install and buy a software.