Affinity Designer trying to use 20GB of ram when I only have 16?

Question

Affinity Designer trying to use 20GB of ram when I only have 16?

Hello,

I've noticed when working on large projects with Affinity Designer / Photo they its sing a lot of memory/ram for example in one project, "Activity Monitor" on the Mac is saying Affinity Designer is using 20.43GB of memory when I only have 16GB?

I've attached a image below:

For this project:

the file size is 663.9 MB with a artboard size of 23822.2 px X 6585.3 px and 300 DPI

As for the Mac its:

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), with a 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 and AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2 GB

Could it be Designer is leaking memory or is it saying to be able to run this project smoothly I need around 20GB of ram?

Here are some more images from "Activity Monitor"

Thank you for your time,

Andrew.

iMac 27", macOS 10.12

Posted on Jan 3, 2020 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Glen Doggett

Level 4

2,753 points

Jan 3, 2020 11:41 PM in response to SpiralProduction

"Swap Used:" is the memory usage beyond your actual RAM where the computer is using free space on the hard drive, which reading and writing is much slower than actual physical RAM but necessary in order to meet the memory demands of the apps you are running. This is also called virtual memory. If you have an SSD or very fast hard drive, there is nothing wrong with using swap. In fact, some apps allow you to select a location for where a scratch file can be written, like on a different drive than your boot drive, to share the read/write operations over two drives simultaneously during typical computer operations. This was useful back in the day when RAM maxed out at only a few GB. Today, RAM is relatively cheap. You can try to split up image files into smaller patches to work on bits of it at a time, or upgrade your RAM to meet the demands of your app so that you don't have to spill over into the swap space on the hard drive. Ideally the Swap would go down to zero if you have added enough RAM.

PS - leaking memory is a term used to refer to an app that does not release memory that it no longer needs, and can basically block other apps from using that memory, usually due to a defect in the software. Your software seems to be running normally, just your particular project is a very large amount of data. No memory "leak" is observed here.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jan 3, 2020 9:49 AM in response to SpiralProduction

Working with such large pics you should really have 32 GB of RAM!

https://eshop.macsales.com/upgrades/imac-retina-5k-27-inch-late-2014-3.5-ghz/memory

It's using Virtual Memory on the Drive which really slows things down.

To tell more...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report...

https://pastebin.com/

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck.

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Answer 3

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

Jan 3, 2020 8:52 AM in response to SpiralProduction

Please contact the developers of Affinity Designer, it is not an Apple app.

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Answer 4

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,494 points

Jan 3, 2020 5:46 PM in response to SpiralProduction

Please follow the directions to post your report. Simply save it and then use the icon below that looks like a piece of paper (3rd from the left) and attach it.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jan 4, 2020 9:16 AM in response to SpiralProduction

Yep, looks clean, more RAM is in order. :)

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Answer 6

Jan 3, 2020 4:21 PM in response to BDAqua

Hello and thank you for the replay.

I was unsure witch test to do with EtreCheck, so I selected the "Computer is slow" one. Here is the report: https://pastebin.com/aYWNQnLN

If you would like to do one of the other tests I am happy to do so, do I also need to be running the software (Affinity Designer) at the time of the test.

Thank you for your time,

Andrew.

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Answer 7

Jan 3, 2020 5:54 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Report from EtreCheck

I've uploaded the report also to the paper icon.

However BDAqua asked to upload it to pastebin.com since using the paper icon he said is "Workable but harder for me to work with" and they pastebin would be a "good place to paste the whole report" So I don't fully understand how I am not following the directions.

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