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Saving takes either 10 seconds or 10+ minutes...


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Saving my document either takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes. When it takes 10 minutes, my laptop gets extremely slow and laggy and I can barely do anything or type. 

In the same document, a save might take 10 seconds. Othertimes in the same document, a save might take 10 minutes or longer. On the long saves, the progress bar is empty until it starts moving and then its the normal 10 seconds (or so).

 

Using 1.7.2. This never happened in 1.7.1 (it crashed saving sometimes and just disappeared, but when saving worked it was always 10-30 seconds, etc.)

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This last save took 29 minutes and when it finished some of my images disappeared.

I can provide sysinfo file on request.

121 pages, many images (max 2 per page, so probably 220+ images), all images are linked, afpub file is 27 mb.

Very simple layout. 4 panel, text on left panels, images on right panels. Master page has a basic background image (linked). Nothing fancy with fonts, just standard stuff.

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  • Staff

Hi Jim,

I've not heard any other reports of inconsistent saving times, and not had any luck reproducing it from having a quick look.

Can you (if possible) embed all images and upload the file here? I'll see if I can reproduce it

Thanks

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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It’s just a thought, but have you had a look at the Task manager while Publisher is taking a long time saving?
What sort of memory/disk/CPU resources are being used, and by what? Does your machine look ‘stressed’ or are things just taking a long time?

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The CPU/memory/disk etc. are all less than 1%. It's really strange, but Publisher CPU usage then is like 0.6%. It's like it's not even doing anything. It's lower then during when I'm actually using the app.

 

It's also really strange that the CPU/Memory/Disk %s are really low (I have no other apps other than maybe Windows Explorer and Chrome open), but even though everything is low my laptop is really slow to open new browser tabs, type, render pages, just delayed functions and slow, but Task Manager doesn't show anything happening (anything abnormal).

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Can you try:
* Run Resource Monitor;
* Go to the CPU tab;
* Find the Maximum Frequency field on the Processes bar;
* Save your document in Publisher while watching the Maximum Frequency field in Resource Monitor.
What does this value do?
If it drops way down then the CPU might be getting ‘throttled back’ because of overheating issues.

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4 minutes ago, GarryP said:

the CPU might be getting ‘throttled back’ because of overheating issues

Utilities such as Speccy will report the readings from your CPU and motherboard temperature sensors.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I would run some diagnostics on the Laptop, especially drive-related ones, you could have a drive on the way out

Happened to me about 5 months ago with nothing obvious showing in Task Manager

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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I need to buy a new laptop anyways, but I've been avoiding it for the last 2 years because I don't want to re-install all of my software again...

I did a few saves this morning, the longest save was around 1 minute and the Max Freq was around 113%. The 30 minute saves were usually every 2nd or 3rd save, so I feel like I should have had at least one save issue out of the last few saves. 

I did change 1 thing about the file today than yesterday. When I was zipping the files to send to DropBox, WinZip said one file had a problem and couldn't be included because of a special character which I couldn't see in the filename. After I copied/pasted the filename into notepad, I saw a [] box, removed it, copy/pasted renamed the image, then replaced it this morning. Not sure that would impact the save times. The hidden character was a ` or ' symbol.

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  • Staff

I've done a good few saves from this file and it's never taken longer than 10 seconds.

Are the saves you are making after you've made edits? Or if you just load the file and Save As a few times it will happen?

I do agree with some of the above posts, this could be an issue with the drive you are saving to, or another slight issue with your machine. As well as doing some of the diagnostics highlighted above, have you tried saving to different locations?

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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You could try running the Windows Memory Diagnostic – Control Panel, search for ‘memory’ – to see if there are any problems with the memory (will require a restart).
Then you could try running “chkdsk /r” at an Administrator command prompt to check the disk (will probably take a long time).

I don’t think the filename change will make much of a difference but strange things do happen.
This podcast episode (well worth a listen if you’ve got the time) tells of one weird tale: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-virus/

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The saves are after making edits. It's when I'm editing, updating, adding pages, moving stuff, etc. - normal "work."

I'll keep trying tonight and see if there's any problems. I don't have any issues with any other program (Adobe suite, Office suite, etc.) or Affinity Designer, just Publisher.

 

Also, never happened in Publisher 1.7.1 and doesn't happen on other documents of same size (> 20mb) but different content.

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There’s nothing there that screams that there’s a problem with your system. It’s worth trying the memory diagnostics and disk repair as mentioned above but I don’t think you’ll find much.

It seems like the problem, as you say, could be to do with how Publisher is running with this particular file on your particular machine in its current particular set-up, and that’s going to be difficult to diagnose.

Some further thoughts:
* Have you tried running Publisher in Windows Safe Mode? If that’s fine then it’s probably not Publisher to fault.
* Have you tried temporarily disabling your anti-virus software? If Publisher is repeatedly ‘touching’ lots of image files during the save (for some reason) it could be setting off some background process which could be giving rise to a backlog of resource checks(?) that are keeping the machine busy without impacting on actual machine resources. (Probably not but it’s worth a try.)
* Have you tried, as Jon P suggested above, saving to a different location? If you can save to a memory card, and have one large enough, then that might be a good thing to try as you will be bypassing the physical disk and some intervening systems (disk management software) and, if you set your anti-virus up to not scan the memory card, the anti-virus software. (Saving to a memory card might make it quicker overall anyway, and you can use something like Task Scheduler to copy the file to disk regularly.)
* Have you tried temporarily disabling any disk management/improvement software (e.g. Intel Rapid Storage, etc.)? There could be a chance that the way Publisher is saving the file is ‘interfering’ with the way that works and causing a problem.

I think this is going to be a tricky one to diagnose without lots of experiments but it looks a bit like something is creating a backlog of ‘synchronous wait states’ that are clogging your system until they’re cleared (whatever I mean by that).

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Update: Tried turning off Anti-Virus, Intel Rapid Storage is off, chkdsk /r ran for 5 hours, etc. Nothing helped.

 

However, this is going to sound strange... After having 3-4 long saves today after in a row, I'm now zoomed in to 150% looking at text. When I save, then it takes about 30 seconds. I've been able to successfully save about 10 times in a row now. (It's crashed twice, but that was image rendering/loading issue.)

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That is strange. I’m definitely tending towards saying that it’s a Publisher issue rather than something else now.

I don’t know how the software works internally but since it seems to hold rasterised versions of what’s in the document so it can display things more quickly, I’m wondering if – since zooming in seems to have lessened the problem – there might be some internal process that is trying to ‘reorganise’ things before the save and that is putting the software into some kind of ‘wait state’ while it tries to figure out what to save.

As if it’s waiting to receive updated information/resources but the reply gets timed-out (or something). Or maybe it’s taking a long time to check stuff that doesn’t need to be checked, with low machine resource requirements but using long run-time processes. E.g. Sequentially looking at every bit in 200+ 10MB images doesn’t take much in the way of machine resources but it will take a long time.

The zoom might be ‘putting things in order’ somehow so the save doesn’t take as long.

This is all conjecture of course and I might be talking total rubbish (again/as usual – delete as appropriate).

On the upside however, since your memory and hard drive seem to be fine you might be able to wait a while longer before getting a replacement system.

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Thanks. I've been able to save more than fifty times in a row without a single long save. When I initially created the thread, my saves where either 30 seconds or longer (longest save so far has been 75 minutes, they increased each long save from 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, and longer), but it was sporadic - I think that inconsistency was due to sometimes I was at full page zoom and other time I was zoomed in. I haven't had a single long save since I started zooming into 150%.

 

  

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It doesn’t sound like a particularly nice workaround but if it works, it works.
Maybe someone on the team can have another look at it.
If it’s been happening for you then we could all come across the same problem at some point.
Best to fix it soon if possible than to get lots of users crowded at the gates with burning torches and pitchforks (it sounds as if they might have the time to organise something if they have to wait 75 minutes).

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  • Staff

I've tried saving at different zoom resolutions on your document and am still struggling, but I'll bring what you are experiencing up to the devs and see if zooming could effect save times, I can think of a couple of things it might change when saving.

It'll be hard to pin down until we can reproduce it however

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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  • 1 month later...

I am experiencing the exact same issue but with Affinity Photo (but on a MacBook)

The Saving Document dialog box appears to be frozen for 5-10 minutes until the bar finally increases and then completes its save within 5 seconds.

 It is only within the latest Affinity Photo update that I started experiencing this issue.

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