Stability issues - new versions of Photodemon crashing more often than ever

[wickedtef]

I've been a long time user of PhotoDemon. My main reason for using it is when dealing with multiple files at high resolution. This is where PhotoDemon adds value compared to many other simplistic free/cheap alternatives. However, I've noticed that my "success" rate (i.e. working on some photos and then getting to a good quality exported photo) has gone down from about 70% some years ago now to 50%. Yes, you read that right - about half of the time I'm unable to make it to the end without a crash. The thing I find most frustrating is that crashes seem present throughout the software - many of the built-in tools can throw up crashes, but also operations like saving a file, either native pdi format or known formats like png or jpg. The autosave files are usually no good either, unfortunately.

The reason I'm writing this message today is because I've saved an evening of work editing some photos together into a collage, saving it three times as different pdi files and even bmp, every single one of them cannot be opened again. There is something seriously wrong in that PhotoDemon apparently does not detect it is writing garbage to file that it then cannot reopen again. Before that it crashed twice this morning, once when I tried to fill a selection with colour using the paint bucket, the other one just randomly as I was trying to select a photo.

I'm at a point where I'm starting to lose faith in PhotoDemon because of the high failure rate. Please don't let this discourage you - this is simply a request to focus development work on stability for the next period(s) and pause work on new features until stability has improved.

[tannerhelland]

Hello @wickedtef . Thank you for describing your experiences. I'm so very sorry about the challenges you've had with PhotoDemon. I am grateful that you took the time to reach out, because I would never want to ship software that behaves how you've described.

I have opened a dedicated issue for your report at #640. May I ask you to pop over to that link where I've written a longer message, including information on how to attach debug logs from your PhotoDemon instance. Those logs would be an invaluable aid in tracking down what exactly is going wrong with PhotoDemon on your PC.

Thank you so much in advance. I'm eager to get started on a deeper investigation for this.

[tannerhelland]

Me again!

Without any follow-up information, and no reports of instability from anyone else, I'm afraid I've had to "shoot in the dark" trying to address the situation described above. I'd still love to work on this with you, @wickedtef. Debug logs from your /PhotoDemon/Data/Debug folder would be particularly helpful.

That said, the latest PhotoDemon nightly builds now include a swath of features aimed at recovering memory usage when working with multiple images at once. If PhotoDemon runs out of memory, it will aggressively attempt to offload other open images to temporary files on the hard drive before attempting the operation again. This often recovers enough memory to allow previously "impossible" tasks to complete. Offloaded images are silently restored from disk if/when you interact with them.

As a 32-bit application, PhotoDemon will always be limited in how much memory it can address (4 GB technically, but practical considerations limit it to less than 2GB per image, since two image copies are needed for any meaningful operations). If a single massive image exceeds that kind of memory usage, you'll need to switch to a 64-bit application like Paint.NET instead, as PD simply can't handle images that size. Note also that having many layers and/or certain editing operations may require proportionally more memory.

I don't have any other plans to address app stability at the moment, largely because I can't reproduce any stability issues on my local PCs, even when testing PD under all kinds of high-intensity, high-memory-consumption scenarios. I've also not received any other reports of instability from other users that might lead me to understand what's happening here.

Either way, I do hope you'll return so I can work more on this issue with you. Thank you!