Scratch Disk

[George Thomas]

I bought AP 1.7 today and in setting it up, in Prefs I don't find a setting for a Scratch Disk. PhotoShop has used one for years for better performance so I would think AP would follow that method also. Please add it in the coming updates.

Edited June 6, 2019 by George Thomas

[Samoreen]

Hi,

I second this. Usually, software needing to create big temporary files and taking care of the user's system disk (especially when it's an SSD) allow to specify a folder located on another partition. AF Photo is a good software but things that seem obvious for other similar software and that are really simple to implement (like a workspace manager and a user defined scratch folder) are merely ignored. This is strange.

@George,

It seems that AF Photo creates its scratch files in the folder pointed to by the TMP or TEMP user environment variable. I always set these variables to a folder located outside of the system disk.

[Allixria]

On 6/20/2019 at 8:05 AM, Samoreen said:

@George,

It seems that AF Photo creates its scratch files in the folder pointed to by the TMP or TEMP user environment variable. I always set these variables to a folder located outside of the system disk.

Thank you for that precision!

I was gonna build a new computer system and I wanted to set my 2nd m.2 stick to a reserved scratch disk for performance purposes.  What was my surprise when I saw there was no options to set this out in AF!! 

AF .. Just add an option for that temporary folder to be changed in Performance above disk usage warning? .. What is it to read a simple variable instead of an hardcoded value like "/tmp" ?...  Just give us the choice, thank you.

Edited June 27, 2020 by Allixria
word misuse

[Rhuantavan]

It's been.. a while. Is the team considering adding a scratch disk location option?

[MattSelz]

My primary drive is for my operating system... I have other (much larger) drives for my programs, files, etc... and one for cache / scratch space.  Working on a large document in both Designer and Photo, it's sucking up three gigabytes on my primary drive because I can't assign that temp space to a drive where I have terabytes of space.  Like I can in Photoshop and Illustrator!

I really love the Affinity suite, but I'm probably going to have to move back to Adobe products for certain things, in part because of the lack of an assignable temp / scratch drive.

Please add this option! Folks have been asking for a while now, apparently...

[v_kyr]

37 minutes ago, MattSelz said:

it's sucking up three gigabytes on my primary drive because I can't assign that temp space to a drive where I have terabytes of space. 

In the meantime, until this feature is available, you can try to workaround with some tmp path related symbolic links.

[MattSelz]

Excellent suggestion, @v_kyr. It's even easier than assigning symbolic links... in Windows 10, I can change the TEMP and TMP locations in System Settings.

Done... time to restart and see how it goes!

[almo]

Could you let me know how you get on with changing the TEMP and TMP locations please @MattSelz.

I've been testing the trial version of Publisher over inDesign, it was going great, but has really started lagging this afternoon, causing my computer to start complaining about lack of disk space. It could be a coincidence, but it seemed to get a lot worse when fiddling with the baseline grid settings. 

Thanks!

[MattSelz]

2 hours ago, almo said:

Could you let me know how you get on with changing the TEMP and TMP locations please @MattSelz.

I've been testing the trial version of Publisher over inDesign, it was going great, but has really started lagging this afternoon, causing my computer to start complaining about lack of disk space. It could be a coincidence, but it seemed to get a lot worse when fiddling with the baseline grid settings. 

Thanks!

Absolutely seeing some lag in Affinity products after moving my TEMP and TMP locations off the C drive.   I'll be working in it more today; it may be that I simply need to move the directories to a faster drive..?

[Manua]

Hello @MattSelz,

Would love to know more about the process of changing the TEMP and TMP location to see if it helps me during my work.

I bought the V2 suite, currently working on AP 2 on a 160Mpix panorama with few adjustement layers and I find the software quite sluggish and buggy.
It also crash/freeze a lot (while moving layers, masking, merging), and I noticed that it uses 60GB of my C: drive.
I would like to try to use another M.2 SSD as scratch disk.

Thanks !

[Komatös]

@Manua

Moving the Temporary directories (Temp and TMP) does not affect the working performance of Affiinity programs. Here, an insufficient amount of RAM and a badly configured swap file (pagefile.sys) are more likely to be the cause.

What hardware is used? Which Windows version (Windows Key + R, Type winver).

If the programs crash, a crash report is created:

Affinity version 1

 

Affinity Version 2

 

[Manua]

@Komatös

Thanks for your answer.
I have a 6 core intel i9 with 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia quadro p2000 4GB vram running WIN 10 version 22H2 (build 19045.2311).

The last crash was during attempting frequency separation.

Here is the last crash report:

8b7e05e8-ef19-4659-8219-31edddd00947.dmp

[Komatös]

Hi @Manua

The hardware acceleration in affinity programs is a bit "stubborn". I recommend you to switch off the hardware acceleration: Edit -> Preferences -> Performance

But, first check that Windows and the gpu driver are up to date and try Microsoft dotNET repair tool: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/install/repair

And maybe a staff mod can tell more about the crash report.

[Manua]

@Komatös
Thanks for your advices.
Everything was up to date, I still launched microsoft dotNET repair tool just in case.
Nothing found with it.
AP crashes or freezed again despite the hardware acceleration turned off.
I decided to restart the edit all over again without using the previous AP recovered file.
After half of my day spend on it, I finally managed to finish the edit.

I hope I would find a solution to make it more stable and fast otherwise it will be a pain to produce professional work for clients.
Thanks again for your help, I will wait to see if a staff mod can tell me more about the crash report.

[Komatös]

You are welcome!