Hey community! I’m a traditional artist who’s attempting to move into the digital space and falling in love with Krita! I am currently taking an online course which involves submitting artwork weekly.
I started to notice performance issues when working on larger images. I started using an 11x17 inch image size with 600 ppi and 8-bit color. I have noticed at times the program will freeze while in the middle of brush strokes; I’ll have to wait 5 seconds for the app to become responsive again. This will happen once a minute, which gets frustrating.
Can anyone help me to performance tune Krita? Any tips will help!
Setup
Windows 11 running on Intel i7 10th Gen and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q w/16 GB RAM
How much is that in pixels though, in digital we usually don’t work in inches or something. 600 ppi is also double the size you usually need unless you want to print a mural.
From you description I think it could be two things.
Either it’s the “autosave” (it creates a backup file in case Krita crashes) that happens in regular intervals, I think 5 minutes is the default but maybe it’s 1 that would fit your description. Autosave will take a few seconds when you image gets huge (in raw file size).
It could also be that the image gets too large for the memory and Krita needs to swap. This is usually visible at the bottom right in the status bar where the image resolution is visible, it should also show the memory usage and it gets yellow or red when it gets close to the limit or reached ot already. Swapping is a very slow and undesirable process which can make the program freeze too.
6,600 x 10,200 with an estimate of 256 MB of RAM per layer if using 8-bit RGB/A.
That suggests your total system RAM is less than 16 GB because the default RAM allocation is 50% of total system RAM.
Windows 11 is greedy for RAM and can easily use 5GB when nothing else is happening.
How much RAM is in use immediately after a full power down restart?
Do you run other applications at the same time or have demanding background utilities such as ‘fierce’ anti-virus or other security software?
When you’re having these problems, how much RAM is in use according to the Task Manager?
If you then Quit krita, how much RAM is then in use?
This is almost double than what I use even for huge posters.
It would allow for about 32 fully filled layers before the memory is exhausted (according to the settings of OP), probably much sooner when other applications are running and Krita also needs memory for other things than just layers (undo stack, projections, operations). So I guess it’s probably Krita beginning to lag because it’s swapping memory to disk. However still could also be just the autosave, or probably both.
I think 16 GB of RAM for a productivity system is a bit on the low side. I would definitely consider upgrading, if your system is capable of that. From your GPU I infer you have a laptop, in which case it may be a bit tricky. Probably the safest route is to go to a reputable computer store and ask for an advice and assistance.
I believe it’s important to understand that real life measurements don’t really translate to pixel dimensions all that well and often you actually don’t even need a canvas that huge (depending on what you plan to do with the artwork later). And also that doubling the dimensions of canvas quadruples the number of pixels and therefore the memory needed for each layer.
I also agree with YRH, 16 GB also proved to be too less in some situations for me that’s why I upgraded to 32 and I sometimes still come close to its limit.
I was using articles like this one and this one to determine PPI after my first debacle. 300ppi is a good spot for my laptop, but I just ordered a new 32GB laptop to get up to 350-400ppi. I do plan to print some of my comics.
ppi is pretty much meaningless as a value what is important is the dimensions and as a result the total amount of pixels on the canvas. This affects the memory usage.
Definitely, when I had a painting that was literally the size of (almost) a door, I had to upgrade as well. This was many years ago when I didn’t understand that pixels don’t really translate to real life units that much and lower resolutions are usually good enough, even for large prints. Nowadays I rarely work on more than 64 megapixels but because I started to use Blender for 3D rendering the upgrade was still worth it.
