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How to Improve Affinity Photo performance?


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I have a Macbook Pro with 16GB of ram and 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7.

Affinity Photo tends run quite slow. For example, when typing text in a blank document, there's a 3-second delay between each letter appearing. This happens even if no other apps are open.

If I restart, it runs super fast, but it's annoying to restart all the time.

I have tried setting the RAM in settings to max, but in Activity Monitor, aPhoto only ever uses up to 2GB of Ram (and most of the time it usually only uses 500MB). There usually at least 6GB free, so I am not sure why aPhoto runs slowly. 

 

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Hi big smile,

I've got a similar spec Macbook Pro here (2.5MHz  i7 instead of your 2.8 one) and don't get that delay.  You should find the setting that Affinity auto detects the best ones for your system.  Might be worth doing a reset of Affinity and putting those back to default and see how it runs then.  To do the re-start start Affinity from Launch Pad with the Control Key held down and you should get a pop up about resetting some settings. 3 options will be selected and you can just click on Clear.  Once that's done, start a New Document and see how the typing performs 

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4 hours ago, stokerg said:

Hi big smile,

I've got a similar spec Macbook Pro here (2.5MHz  i7 instead of your 2.8 one) and don't get that delay.  You should find the setting that Affinity auto detects the best ones for your system.  Might be worth doing a reset of Affinity and putting those back to default and see how it runs then.  To do the re-start start Affinity from Launch Pad with the Control Key held down and you should get a pop up about resetting some settings. 3 options will be selected and you can just click on Clear.  Once that's done, start a New Document and see how the typing performs 

Thanks for your help. I tried this, but it seems to have made it worse, as now things like the color picker in the gradient overlay (Of the Styles menu) take a long time to appear on screen. If I restart my Mac it's fine, but an hour or so later it will happen again. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

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One possibility is that you have a memory leak from another process. On Windows, I would have the Task Manager window open to monitor memory use. I assume that there is an equivalent facility on a Mac.

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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5 hours ago, John Rostron said:

One possibility is that you have a memory leak from another process. On Windows, I would have the Task Manager window open to monitor memory use. I assume that there is an equivalent facility on a Mac.

On Macs, it would be the Activity Monitor app.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 2 weeks later...

If I create a new document 3507px x 2480px with one short line of text, Activity Monitor reports AP using 995MB +/- of memory.
If I quite AP and then reopen the file,  AP is shown using 982MB +/- of memory.
With this in mind your screenshot of 9.64GB for an empty document seems to me a bit excessive.
If you load the same test file attached here how much memory dose Activity Monitor say your AP is using?

Memory Test.afphoto

macOS 10.15.7  15" Macbook Pro, 2017  |  4 Core i7 3.1GHz CPU  |  Radeon Pro 555 2GB GPU + Integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 1.536GB  |  16GB RAM  |  Wacom Intuos4 M

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On 10/25/2019 at 11:41 AM, markw said:

If I create a new document 3507px x 2480px with one short line of text, Activity Monitor reports AP using 995MB +/- of memory.
If I quite AP and then reopen the file,  AP is shown using 982MB +/- of memory.
With this in mind your screenshot of 9.64GB for an empty document seems to me a bit excessive.
If you load the same test file attached here how much memory dose Activity Monitor say your AP is using?

Memory Test.afphoto

Here is what it says (no other documents are open)

829064854_Screenshot2019-11-01at10_01_22.jpg.3e25ce0bba4df5f608eee91ea9602f9f.jpg

Interestingly, it's super slow. If I edit the text, it beachballs when entering each letter. And it's impossible to use the colour pallettes, because they take a few seconds to open.

If I restart the Mac, everything works again, but it's annoying to restart all the time. 

 

 

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On 10/25/2019 at 12:41 PM, markw said:

If you load the same test file attached here how much memory dose Activity Monitor say your AP is using?

Only for information, Win10.
image.png.3a9baa0ea580c074d48f66c118cb8ae4.png

And without file.
image.png.66b086ebf430f062928c11ff16b51cf5.png

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

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In case it helps with any further investigation I’ve attached four GIFs showing the example file being loaded on Windows 10.

  • First with NVIDIA Control Panel forcing NVIDIA card (GPU 1) to be used with Photo set to use NVIDIA card.
  • Second with NVIDIA Control Panel forcing NVIDIA card to be used with Photo set to use integrated Intel card (GPU 0).
  • Third with NVIDIA Control Panel allowing integrated Intel card to be used with Photo set to use integrated Intel card.
  • Forth with NVIDIA Control Panel allowing integrated Intel card to be used with Photo set to use NVIDIA card.

In each case, after the application has ‘calmed down’ after loading the file, they all pretty much bottom out at around 340MB of memory used.

I don’t know if this is useful but, as I was experimenting out of curiosity anyway, I thought I’d record the results and share them.

I’m now wondering why the result Pšenda got was much lower memory-usage than me. Might be important, might not.

loading-aphoto-document-nvidia-nvidia.gif

loading-aphoto-document-nvidia-intel.gif

loading-aphoto-document-intel-intel.gif

loading-aphoto-document-intel-nvidia.gif

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Well, the results of memory usage that other users have posted here is interesting. Looks to me like Windows is more memory efficient on opening the file than Macs.

However sadly I have no real idea why AP for user @big smile should be struggling with that test file? Or any other file for that matter.
Wish I could help more but right now I'm not sure what the problem might be.

macOS 10.15.7  15" Macbook Pro, 2017  |  4 Core i7 3.1GHz CPU  |  Radeon Pro 555 2GB GPU + Integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 1.536GB  |  16GB RAM  |  Wacom Intuos4 M

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35 minutes ago, markw said:

Looks to me like Windows is more memory efficient on opening the file than Macs.

I doubt there is much we can conclude from comparing the memory use statistics, mostly because Mac memory management works considerably differently from Windows. Among other things, on Macs those statistics include memory resources shared by multiple processes, compressed memory, inactive memory that will not be paged out to disk or purged until some other process needs it, etc.

So for example, right now with no Affinity Photo document open on my iMac, AP is using 1.43 GB of 'memory' but only about 400 MB of that is 'real' (physical) memory. About 1.2 GB of that is compressed memory but only about 1 GB of compressed memory is actually in physical memory & that number includes the compressed memory for all open apps, not just AP.

Opening the test file does not change either AP's 'memory' or 'compressed' memory use, & its real memory use increases by only about 20 MB. But it is all very dynamic, so depending on how many other apps might be open & how many other processes are running from moment to moment, those numbers could change considerably as the Mac memory manager moves data among active, inactive, & compressed memory, purges data or writes it to disk when needed, etc.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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On Macs it's equally (if not better) in overall memory usage. And a double click on the Activity monitor's APh entry should show a finer grade of used mem stats, though it might need some quicker UI refreshs to show up. Thus using a terminal and there-in ...

Quote

> pgrep Affinity Photo/ Access
1064
> top -pid 1064

... often shows a quicker update of actual process informations (press "q" to quit top then).

However, usually on a "Macbook Pro with 16GB of ram and a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7" I would expect APh to run fine without much performance lagging (as far as not too much other system and app processes are run beside), thus you should maybe check too if the APh GPU settings (Metal vs OpenGL etc. dependent on your used OSX version) do play some possible role here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 11/2/2019 at 3:17 PM, v_kyr said:

However, usually on a "Macbook Pro with 16GB of ram and a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7" I would expect APh to run fine without much performance lagging (as far as not too much other system and app processes are run beside), thus you should maybe check too if the APh GPU settings (Metal vs OpenGL etc. dependent on your used OSX version) do play some possible role here.

Thanks, what should I set the GPU settings to? I am using 10.14.6.

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If Metal is set and supported for your MBP, then you can try if the behavior changes when OpenGL is setup instead. - On older iMac & OSX systems (so no modern MBP here) these are the default performance settings ...

set1.jpg.99776f7be646cba7a727167a15902909.jpg

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Sheer curiousity,

 

Have you tried a simple PRAM reset? 

When booting up the macbook, have you literally watched for the initial apple screen... then hold  "   command,  option,  P,  R " (Press in that order, but hold everything).

The Macbook will reboot/restart. Your clearly obvious clue it worked....LOUD boot start.... 

It just clears some basic cache issues, errors. Fixes wifi and other issues randomly. It shouldn't fix Infinity photo for mac. But i've seen stranger things.

 

SMC Reset involves the 5 point screwdriver removing base panel, another screwdriver (3 point I think) to remove screw locking in battery. Disconnect battery (just the power). Then hold the power button for 10-15 seconds. (Also make sure your power cord is disconnected as well).

 

These are the most basics of basic Troubleshoot i've always gone to, to solve most basic issues outside the processing exploring challenges.

Best of luck.

 

Alternately, Since i'm unfamiliar with i7 model you're on. (ie, year, etc). Is your hard drive a ssd/fusion or hdd? If HDD alone, still physical 2.5" drive. You can clone it to a newer SSD, or just do a backup entirely to an external with the time machine feature...  Then swap hdd's and install to mac osx recovery/rebuild (have a bootable usb handy for this if you're able). Install mac osx to ssd, then restore with your time machine. Might take a few hours but the speed difference if on an older hdd, will surprise. (And battery life gained is +30-120mins).

 

:)

 

 

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