Pixelmator Pro memory leak

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2021-11-24 20:36:28

All software up to date. Just opening the app causes it to use over 1GB of memory. Any ideas what I can do to fix it? I have already uninstalled and installed it again.
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2021-11-25 09:17:06

On a M1Mac it´s for a fresh start with an A4 plus white background layer about 646MB.
@newbie user guy; please erase your serial number from the screenshot.
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2021-11-25 12:46:11

That's strange... In theory, an A4 document opening should be around 400MB but the memory usage may vary depending on the currently active tool or previously activated ones. We'll look into this.

newbie user guy, do you mean you see this memory usage when in the Welcome screen, with no documents open?
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2021-11-25 12:48:50

Yes. It gets larger when I open a document, and it will release that memory when closed. It never released the 1GB+ it uses from opening the welcome screen. If I have more than one tab I am working with it slows my mac until I force quit pixelmator.
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2021-11-25 16:16:48

Got it. If it's possible, could you send the last 10 documents you see in your Welcome screen to us at support@pixelmator.com? We'd try to reproduce the issue on our end. You can zip up the documents and use our upload server to share them. Thanks!
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2021-11-26 00:18:54

I can't share the documents as they are client related. Sorry.
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2021-11-26 17:37:11

by Charles J Taft 2021-11-26 13:36:55 Check this on TidBits
https://tidbits.com/2021/11/15/custom-m ... mory-leak/
Holy smokes, those are some very interesting findings!
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2021-11-26 21:59:14

by Charles J Taft 2021-11-26 21:35:07 Check this on TidBits
https://tidbits.com/2021/11/15/custom-m ... mory-leak/
I was aware of this, but it's not it. I never had any but default pointer settings.
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2021-11-26 22:17:48

From the article:
However, Howard Oakley points out that this leak is associated with any pointer change—such as from the arrow to the text insertion bar—so any app with frequent pointer changes, like a Web browser, will suffer from this issue.
If this is true, it would affect Pixelmator Pro even if you don’t have a custom pointer because we’ve got lots and lots of them…
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2021-11-27 01:40:34

Maybe this is the cause then. Horrible since it slows everything down until a reboot.
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2021-11-27 21:38:25

After testing for a few days what is happening is Pixelmator never release memory. It can star very low after a reboot, smallest was 47mb, but as I use it, memory usage grows and never reduces. If I force quit the app it still doesn't release it. I have to restart my MacBook in order to get the memory back.
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2022-02-15 05:48:01

Has there been any progress on finding a solution for the memory leak issue?

On my machine, Pixelmator takes 4-5 minutes to launch and opening one 75MB vector document takes another 2-3 minutes and then Activity Monitor reports that the application is using 1.75GB of memory. I love Pixelmator, but this memory issue is making me dread working with the application since it takes so long to launch and often freezes at the slightest provocation.
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2022-02-15 09:52:12

by freezerclown 2022-02-15 03:48:01 Has there been any progress on finding a solution for the memory leak issue?

On my machine, Pixelmator takes 4-5 minutes to launch and opening one 75MB vector document takes another 2-3 minutes and then Activity Monitor reports that the application is using 1.75GB of memory. I love Pixelmator, but this memory issue is making me dread working with the application since it takes so long to launch and often freezes at the slightest provocation.
The app shouldn't be taking this long to open, but a 75MB vector document actually sounds quite large. For example, a 3000x3000-pixel document consisting of 100 circle shapes is just 1 MB. So, if the file contains vector data only, then it's quite likely that there are quite a few layers to render. You can check the layer count by choosing View > Show Document Info.

Pixelmator Pro is primarily a raster-based application, so all the shape layers are vector layers under the hood, but each one still needs to be rendered as pixels on the screen. And creating a bitmap representation of the layer requires memory – in this case, depending on the number of layers, 1.75GB isn't necessarily an unreasonable amount. So, could you check the document info and let me know the size in pixels and the number of layers?

As for the opening issue, is the app restoring any previously open documents, or does it take that long to show just the Welcome screen?