Slow

[Dazmondo77]

I'm the first to admit, I'm a total Affinity fanboy so this is a difficult one --- I've been sitting on this problem for a week or so as I know publisher is a massive deal and a major focus for the Affinity team - but I can't work normally on my children's book illustrations as there appears to be slowdowns, the most annoying being the time it takes to open the .afdesign file which has gone from around 4 minutes to open in 1.6 (which ran nice and quick and snappy) and roughly about the same time to open in betas 1.7.0 - 1.7.0.7 (still nice and quick performance) then with the move upto beta 1.7.0.8 performance had slowed to a crawl then 1.7.0.10 refused to open the file but appeared to be fixed in beta 1.7.0.11 although it was now taking around 10 minutes to open and still with the slow performance issues (originally reported on May 6th - see below)

With the 1.7.0 Appstore release I was having slightly better performance and far less beach balling but I timed the document opening at 16 minutes (WHAT!) then came the 1.7.1 update (me hopeful I'd get some performance increase) but I was left watching "Loading 1 document" for ages way more than 16 minutes before force quitting and restarting my mac (wish there was a progress bar?) so thought I'd time it opening = 46 minutes (AAAGGGHHH!) well at least it opens! - I though before bothering the forum, I'd have a go at trying to improve things with a few tricks that helped me out years ago in Illustrator and also Quark - so I went back to the first 8 pages which I put together in 1.6 which opened up in around 30 seconds in 1.7.1 and was super quick and nippy to get around then I took pages from the 1.7.1 46 minute doc and copy pasted into fresh art boards in the 8 page doc - all went really well I I was getting nippy performance compared to the 46 minute version, which was slow and choppy to get around - re-saved as 'NITN proper.afdesign' I also went through all the pages and layers and trashed anything not in use, in order to streamline the file - saved, quit Designer and re-started and re-opened the new file, thinking I'd wait maybe 5 minutes or so so at most, thought I'd time it, just in case = 1 hour 50 minutes (WTF......AAAAAAAAAAGGGGVHHHHHHHH!) + lots of beach balling - although, no more jumpy, choppy performance when getting around and zooming (between beach balls that can lock up for around 5 minutes) 

The artwork for the first book in the series (which uses all the same characters, textures and all that and is the same 26 page format) was having similar performance and opening issues in the last beta but now takes less than a minute to open and is nice and fast and fluent in 1.7.1 and all my smaller documents run like a dream.

I'm currently at the final 'last tweaks stage' before we get PDF and hard proof copies to send out to agents and publishers along with the first book (we are down to the last 30 hard proof copies) - all flawlessly put together in publisher using rasterised linked tiffs of the art boards from the problem file.

Just wondered if someone can offer help or advice - and yes, after tuning into Affinity Live the other night, I wish I had Metal compute but I need to stick with El Capitan as it's the last Mac OS that runs 32bit apps (CS5) without major issue (I only very occasionally run Illustrator to plug the gaps til' designer has all the knobs and whistles) but the main one is Acrobat pro 9 which I need for checking pdfs as theres nothing else, apart from Callas PDFtoolbox (£500!) so NO METAL (for the foreseeable future)

 

(original forum bug report:-)

 

[Dazmondo77]

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[Sean P]

Hi Dazmondo77,

Really sorry for the slow response on this thread!  I've spoken to Matt about this and he's shined a light on a couple of problem areas.

Your initial thread which reported performance inside the app did reveal a few problems which Matt has fixed.

However regarding the file opening times, how are you timing these? Are you ensuring the title bar (which says Loading xx%) gets to 100%, or are you counting until you see your file inside the application? I tried it on my Late 2013 iMac (which has an SSD) and it was pretty quick, however I've tried it on a Late 2009 iMac (which has a disk based hard drive) and it did take a good 10 minutes or so to load. Which is still nowhere near the almost 2 hours it took you! Is your file stored locally on the Mac or is it on another drive or a form of Cloud Storage?

In 1.7 we stream the file to disk to help protect against network outages or loss of drives etc, however as this has to write to disk it is going to be slower on a non SSD. In your case it very much sounds like this is where the slowdown is happening and why it could be taking a large amount of time. The beach balls you are getting in application could be the result of the Autosave interval being set to 5 minutes by default which is then having to write to disk some more.

Are you able to try opening the file whilst you have Activity Monitor visible set to Disk and see if that shows constant disk drive usage or alludes t

I'm not entirely sure how possible it is, but are those models of Mac upgradable? I wasn't sure how easy it would be to try an SSD if you had one spare.

I really wish I had some better solutions for you!