regular crashes

[Klangrede]

Affinity crashes at least ten times a day (often more than 20 times).
Independent of what I do, or WHETHER I do anything. Can anyone think of a reason?

So far I could not detect any connection between something I do and the crashes. As written above: it even crashes while I am away from the computer.
Thanks a lot,
Stephan

ps: I use Affinity since November 2018 on a Mac desktop (iMac, High Sierra).
I also noticed that Affinity always resets all preferences (wand size etc.) when crashing.

[MEB]

Hi Klangrede,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Please press and hold ⌃(ctrl) while launching the application until a Clear User Data dialog appears. Keep the first three checkboxes ticked then press Clear.
Does it still crash after the reset?

[Klangrede]

Hi MEB, thank you very much! Will try this as soon as I am back at my desktop!
There is not much User Data the app can have stored (because it looses all set preferences after each crash anyway), but I assume it may be a good step to try out anyway.
Will report result. Thx again.

 

[Klangrede]

Thank you very much!
So far it seems to have worked. No crashes for hours already. Nice feeling.

I maybe should open a new topic/thread for another question I have (and will, if I don't get a reply here), but is there any chance to fix the following mystery?
When I open a number of files simultaneously, they never appear in any order as tabs — neither alphabetically nor chronologically etc.
If I rework a number of photos I shot at the same evening, it would be extremely useful to rework them in the order they were shot. But I always have to look through all tabs, which opened in completely arbitrary order (as it seems).
Is there any way to sort the tab order in Affinity?
I am skeptical there is, because this very same problem also existed with Photoshop, so there might be something in the background that prevents this in any application. But what?
Thanks again, Stephan

[Old Bruce]

51 minutes ago, Klangrede said:

When I open a number of files simultaneously, they never appear in any order as tabs — neither alphabetically nor chronologically etc.

Bugs me too.

[MEB]

Hi Stephan,
Currently Affinity apps don't follow any specific order and there's no way to sort the document's tab order automatically. There's already an improvement request logged to open them sequentially when there's some pattern in the file name but this wasn't implemented yet.

[Klangrede]

Thanks, MEB!
This would be such a welcome improvement!
 

[R C-R]

19 hours ago, Klangrede said:

I am skeptical there is, because this very same problem also existed with Photoshop, so there might be something in the background that prevents this in any application. But what?

I think the order is determined by how quickly each file is ready to be displayed in a tab, which in turn depends on how much of it needs to be loaded into memory before that can happen. That in turn depends on the file's size & complexity, how much of it might already be loaded into inactive memory, some drive related stuff like buffer size & number of pending file operations, & so on.

Since there is no way to predict how long it will take each file to load because there are so many variables involved, & sequentially opening them one at a time based on some user specified order is less efficient than letting the app, OS, file system, etc. work together to sort all that out during a multi-file request, I suspect the most practical & straightforward way to implement this would be with a separate option to reorder the tabs that would be available after they have all loaded, maybe with choices based on file names, creation or modified dates, or possibly other file metadata.

[Klangrede]

@R C-R: Thank you, that sounds like a reasonable explanation. Hopefully, the desire to sort the tabs will be accepted as a useful demand one day soon.

[Klangrede]

Okay, back to the crashes. It happened again.
Since Affinity doesn't give a reason for its crashing, it is really hard to tell why it does.

This time it was while I was opening 12 JPGs (one multi-layered aphoto file was open before).

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, Klangrede said:

Since Affinity doesn't give a reason for its crashing, it is really hard to tell why it does.

If the app crashes, (eventually) a crash report notification should appear on the screen, which includes a lot of info about what the app was doing just prior to the crash. The info is intended for developers so there isn't much an end user can learn from it, but sending it to Affinity may help them determine the cause of the crash. 

The crash log files can be found in the per user ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ folder, or accessed via the Console app in the Sources > User Reports section.

[Klangrede]

Merci, R C-R, found the Crash Report. Will try to send it next time.
And simultanously find out what caused the crashes myself to try to avoid the situation.