Hello! I hope this is the right thread to post this in, I made an account here specifically for some help.
Making an animation for the very first time! I’m only 28 frames in, and already my RAM usage is nearly completely up. I have around 20 layers or so (mostly for coloring (and most of which are unused so far)), and my canvas size is 3,812 × 2,684, with 300 DPI I believe. Every time I add a frame and delete it, the RAM usage goes up and won’t go back down. I’ve already tried reducing the undo stackage, messing with the scaling, and giving more RAM for Krita to use (underneath the swap section), but it won’t go down and stays in the red no matter what.
I’m running on a Windows 11 laptop, I have 8GB of RAM available and 7.4 or so that’s still usable. Nothing else is running in the background. Even when I don’t do anything, the RAM usage just keeps going up.
I’m providing an image of what my RAM bar is telling me. I’m not very tech savvy at all, so if it’s obvious, please forgive me :') any help is greatly appreciated!!!
I don’t have a full answer for you but wanted to say it’s going to be really tough to do animations with only 8 GB RAM. Your operating system is going to take a big chunk of that so you don’t really have 7.4 GB available. It’s good that you thought of not running any other apps in the background.
Some ideas:
The canvas size is kind of large. Could you make it smaller?
Can you add RAM to your device? 16 GB will still be challenging but it would help a lot.
Saving your work and then closing Krita from time to time will help to keep the memory usage from growing and growing.
Others here may have more ideas or a different solution for you.
Hello sooz!! Thank you sooo much for your kind and quick response, I wasn’t expecting one for a couple of days really!
One thing I feel I should mention, that I forgot to add into my original post- is I’m animating along with someone else. They have a separate laptop (much older) with around the same amount of RAM that doesn’t take up nearly as much (the only big difference is less folders).
In response to your questions:
I MIGHT be able to, but would I need to resize it by a large amount? The animation takes about the whole canvas.
I can add RAM! I was looking to see if I can change something in my computer before spending. If i can ask, since 16 GB would still be challenging, what would you recommend that might be comfortable without going overboard?
I did see something about that! But when I tried, the RAM usage still doesn’t go down.
Once again, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to me! Thank you very much
You computer has less memory than my phone and it’s unfortunately not easy to make a lengthy animation at what’s essentially 4K resolution on a “phone”.
Every layer alone will take about 39 MB of RAM you already have 20 and that again gets basically duplicated for every frame of animation you have (simplified example). So naturally the project when in memory gets huge, the longer the animation gets. Krita already does a good job at only allocating memory for things that are actually drawn so a partially used layer will only use memory for the parts with actual content.
I your case Krita has already started swapping this means it’s writing to your hard drive what should be in memory and hard drives (even SSDs) are snail mail compared to RAM, you probably noticed it getting really slow. Not only does it swap it already does after just using 3.8 GB of memory this means that 4.2 GB are already taken by the operating system. Honestly I don’t even know why devices with 8 or less GB RAM get even sold with Windows nowadays.
So about why the memory Usage doesn’t go down: This is actually something Krita can only do so much about. Memory is mostly managed by the operating system nowadays. Krita will ask the system for more memory since it will need it for a new layer if it doesn’t need it anymore (when it’s deleted and not needed anymore for a possible Undo operation) it unallocates it. However the OS will not free the memory instantly it will notice that Krita needs a lot of memory, often requests more and then decide it is better to just keep it reserved for Krita because it probably needs it again later. Otherwise the OS could get in trouble when it’s low on RAM, it gave Krita’s memory back to something else, because you want to watch a video on YouTube or something, and now Krita needs it back … The OS would now have to steal it somewhere and constantly move stuff around, which would affect the responsiveness of your applications or even make the crash.
So, since you’re basically trying to do professional work on what is essentially a potato for your purpose, the only thing you can do is either upgrade your computer or scale down your project.
I already mentioned you’re basically trying to make a 4K movie and there is a reason you need high speed internet to stream them because it’s just so much data. And you need to have all this data at the same time in Memory since otherwise you can’t edit it. So the only way would be to scale down your entire project to something more reasonable for your system’s specs like 1080 maybe? Doubling the dimensions of an image quadruples the amount of pixels and memory usage with it. So by halving the image size you should already need only a quarter of the currently needed memory.
As a comparison, I don’t even do animations much and my normal Krita projects already take up to 10 GB sometimes (for a single still image). So my Laptop has 16 GB of RAM my Desktop computer is a Workstation with 32, this is where I do animation, 3D rendering stuff and drawing. I don’t need all the memory for the projects but I maybe want to watch a stream or listen to music, have my browser tabs open with references and all this needs memory too, so you always have some left over.
Windows 11 is very greedy for RAM compared to Windows 10. My Windows 11 desktop uses 5 GB of RAM as soon as it’s started and that is 4 GB for ‘System’ then another 1 GB for a massive number of ‘little helper’ processes that must be there to allow the operating system to work.
If your laptop has an empty/spare memory slot them it’s easy to add RAM.
If there is no empty/spare slot then you can remove existing RAM modules and replace them with ones of larger capacity.
Depending on the laptop, for a system with two slots it would be a good idea to put identical size/spec RAM modules in each slot.
If there are cost constraints then what you can do depends on what you have at the moment and how it’s organised. You might have a two slot 8 GB laptop (i.e. 2 x 4 GB) that can be upgraded to 12 GB by replacing one of the 4 GB modules with an 8 GB module.
It’s best to ask the seller of the RAM modules because they are experts in this subject and have details of your laptop available to them.
