Is it normal that on larger projects the time when saving files is longer? If so, what kind of hardware would i need to buy in order to accelerate the process?
Larger files with more frames take longer to save, this is normal. Your document needs to be processed cel by cel to generate the file to write out, and for larger projects, that can be a lot of data to process.
I’m not familiar with the implementation details, but based on my own observations, I think the bottleneck is CPU speed, as Aseprite files take much longer to save than simply writing a file of that size would take. The entire document needs to be processed into data, and it’s this that takes a while. You can see similar delays with processes that deal with the entire document but which don’t save the file, such as generating the preview for exporting a sprite sheet. I suspect the process is single-threaded, which means the only way to speed it up would be to use a CPU with a higher clock speed. However, the real problem is probably not your CPU, but Aseprite - for the work it’s doing, it’s on the slow side, and I suspect the process is simply not written very efficiently, perhaps the GUI is getting a bunch of unnecessary events during saving prep.
If you’re seeing very slow saving speeds, check your RAM usage during saving. It’s possible that your project is so large that you don’t have enough RAM to store the copy-to-be-saved in memory and your OS ends up swapping (writing part of its memory to disk), which is slow. I’ve never encountered such an issue myself with Aseprite, though. I’ve not worked with huge projects, but saving my multi-layer 200-frame projects doesn’t use much extra RAM.
In general, whenever you see a performance problem with a program, check your OS’s performance monitor. Most of them have something built in, e.g. Window’s Task Manager, MacOS’s Activity Monitor. See what spikes when the poor performance occurs. Sometimes you can get better performance just by closing other programs competing for the same resource, or by just taking better care of your hardware (some components will throttle themselves when they overheat, which can happen if your machine is dusty inside, or if there’s a heater nearby). And if you do need to upgrade, then seeing what the actual bottleneck is for your specific use case will be a better guide than a random stranger’s theories.
Thanks for the reply! Apparently the RAM is not the problem, the CPU usage goes up +10% when saving, closing applications didnt change the saving speed at all. So this probably is really about aseprite single-threaded saving process. Welp, gotta cope with it i presume.
Depending on what you’re doing exactly, perhaps splitting the document up into several might be an option? That way you’ll only have to save the part you’re working on, rather than the whole thing.
I know this thread is five years old but I’m truly curious as to why Aseprite takes so much time to save. I also wonder if I could ask for faster save time as a feature (optimizing operations, simplified serialized format etc). I’m certain it’s not a hardware issue because I have a 3.5Ghz Core i9 and 64GB of RAM.
Coming from software development I have a compulsive need to save my work often and I find myself stuck on minutes of work-blocking loading because of saving. It stops me in my tracks and I can either wait or outright cancel the save, postponing it to a later time. It’s very irritating as I work with 400+ frame files and I find Aseprite, although a tool I very much appreciate, feels ill-suited for operations of this scale.
So in conclusion I would deeply appreciate any effort to increase save performance. I enjoy this tool a lot but this saving time has been the bane of my existence ever since my files have grown larger.
Thanks,