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Anonymous

Question

Fireworks CS5 = OUT OF MEMORY problem

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
July 8, 2010
10 replies
24285 views

Hi Guys

I've been getting this "out of memory" problem when working on fireworks. Not really that often but when it does occur it's annoying i have to close my open documents in FW and reopen it..

When this error occurs, the elements in FW are not shown anymore i just get this boxes that say "not enough memory"

Now I'd probably suspect my PC running out of RAM or something, if it wasnt for the fact that I have 8GB DDR2 1100Mhz Ram installed on my Windows 7 x64 Machine.. and I have plenty of swap disk left too.. and the fact that when this happened i'm only consumung 5GB of my 8GB tank..

So could this be a FW memory handling problem?

Regards

This topic has been closed for replies.

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focusbox11

Participant

This is extremely annoying. Is Adobe listening? People are paying big bucks here to get their product and yet they got this. When I searched Adobe's KB, the suggestion was (laugh if you wish) max out your RAM and get a faster computer, Duh?

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mzetlitz

Participating Frequently

@Focusbox11,

I think they are listening, but what is somewhat annoying is that fixes are included in a whole new product release, not backwards patched.

64Bit is the only feature in FW CS6 that I see as positive. People who design for the web, needs to know CSS. CSS/jQuery theme exports produces automated markup, hardly the most helpful feature. @font-face support etc, would have been so much more welcome.

While I do not mind paying high for working software, I am appalled that one has to live with a problem for so long. Some of the issues with FW has been present since CS3.

All kudos to Macromedia who once upon a time created these products, but they were not exactly know for producing stable products and their codebase (I know from LearningSpace 5, old Macromedia product) wasn't the best. I fear that lots of old code has been present all along, which explains a lot.

Adobe: With 64Bit support in FW CS6, I would like to know if this is a major rewrite of the core.

optimiced

Participating Frequently

Fireworks CS6 is not 64bit app. There are many improvements in it: on Windows 7 64 bit, Fireworks will be able to use more RAM, and GDI objects issues has been fixed; but Fireworks remains 32bit app, nevertheless...

The reason why Fw CS5, for example, cannot receive a new patch, is that there were made some serious updates to the core, and simply updating older Fw version(s) would be too problematic...

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mzetlitz

Participating Frequently

I have to agree with people here and it is worrisome to me that the first post was in 2010 and two years later, we experience the same issues.

Fireworks in the lifeblood of my professional work, I run a agency that utilizes Fireworks primarily doing UI,UX,IXD for all sorts of projects, from medium size business to high-ends.

Fireworks is the only application by Adobe and on the market that delivers the ability to work wireframes, vectorized, with pixel perfect interfaces, interaction work and full design compositions. Photoshop/Illustrator is inferior to FW when it comes to this and Adobe has to realise both the market and the advantage that they have with this. It becomes more critical as we move into new standards on the web and with apps.

I am quite frustrated that it requires no more than 100 objects in a sketch/file, a few pages, layers and a file of 2mb to turn FW into a slug. This is regardless of it being run on a Win7 i7 with 8gb of ram, an i7 Macook Air with 4gb or a Mac Pro Xeon 8 core with 32gb ram.

Moving objects, selecting objects, copy/paste and all sorts of minor adjustments are sluggish, respons jerky. It takes a restart once in a while, but it slugs down fast. A lot of the stuff is vector, from icons, to simple lines and objects (and no, Illustrator can't deliver what I need).

I'd rather see that Adobe fixes the memory/stability issues, than introducing new features. An example: While it might be useful for someone, drop everything from texture packs (nobody uses a Berber texture fill) to anything that competes with Photoshop/Illustrator where e.g. Photoshop does better (I am thinking touching up images etc).

What a lot of the users (based on fellow FW fans) would want, is a stable, responsive, well implemented software. We produce quality software for our customers and would like to see the same done for us (Adobe MC is expensive in Norway and I do not mind, but I want quality in return).

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mzetlitz

Participating Frequently

Ok, this is what I am talking about.

I have an larger size sketch for wireframes. Most of the stuff is vector, so it can be scaled up/down nicely.

Just doing a simple thing like rasterizing them, would eat up all the memory. I rasterezied all the vector but one icon (due to the memory issue).

So the issue is:

I can rasterize (until a memory issue) in order for the file to be workable. Instead of 2mb+ I get it under 1mb.
Working on a rasterized version defats the purpose, vector should work
A simple thing like making a raster fast surfaces the memory leak

Again, been living with this for years and in many projects. Growing tired of it.

lisaellensegal

Inspiring

I am having the same issues, and always have since I've installed CS5. It's nice to know that I'm not alone. My question is, exactly how do I save the file that I've been working on all day without losing what I've done (cross my fingers). Please tell me exactly what files to delete, and thier path. I am running windows 7, 64 bit, with 8gb ram, i7 processor.

Thanks so much.

Lisa

P.S. It would be nice to fix this issue as Fireworks is a great program.

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Anonymous

Adobe is full of BS when it comes to the support of their products. This problem persists since years and nobody seems to care. Fireworks is thus an unusable product for any of the tasks it is claimed to have been developed for: multi-state prototyping, massive webdesign with the use of symbols, vector and bitmap cooperation.

I have a 16GB memory pool, this application however cannot cope with it, that's why I assemble my designs in Illustrator. (which is not suitable at all. It is not supporting states, it's slicing and pixel precision are very bad and unreliable)

But memory rules it all and crashes are not acceptable. I just wonder why we pay the thousands it costs for it.

Takashi_Morifusa

Participant

Unfortunately Adobe Fireworks CS5 is 32bit application and can access to maximum 2GB. That's 32bits application limitation. Thus, whether you have 8GB, 24GB RAM loaded, Fireworks phisically access to 2GB is the max. We are investigating this to improve memory access for the future version of Fireworks.

Thanks,

Takashi

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DoktorKanukie

Participant

Er how long do we have to wait for this 64bit version? I'm suprised it needs investigation because its been done for Photoshop already so do what they did. But I'm guessing the code is poorly architected due to its long legacy and that it makes a lot of built in assumptions on 32bit architecture so any port will be long and painful and expensive to manage.

CS3 didn't really need more than 2GB of memory because it was coded properly. CS5 is a massive memory leaking mess that creates way too many GDI objects and then exhausts its limited 32bit heap. The course is clear

fix the ridiculous memory leaks in CS5
port it to 64bit architecture

I'm guessing we see neither in CS6. I'm also guessing most fireworks users would trade pointless new features for a stable and reliable tool with the existing feature set - what say you users?

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fabio_love

Participant

from my experience fireworks cs5 crashes when it reach a limit of 1.4 gb of ram used

that is very little because many of the nowadays web projects is made by many pages and many objects images, vectorial

this program need to be 64 bit for serious users, who need to work with lots of multipage files

c'mon adobe just optimize this for users who have plenty of ram and lots of work

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mandrzej

Participant

The same problem here with FW CS5 from Master Collection. Windows 7, 64bit, 8GB RAM, i5.

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Anonymous

The actual problem is with GDI objects not RAM. CS5 doesn't do a good job of cleaning them up when you close documents. Closing Fireworks every few hours will correct the problem because app is removed from memory but this shouldn't be needed. The dev team should be able to clear these objects when a document is closed so we don't have to restart the app so often. IMHO

If you want to view how many GDI objects are being used by any Windows application,

open Task Manager

select View from the tool bar

choose Select Columns

check the box next to GDI Objects

Click OK.

Jason

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DrKanukie

Participating Frequently

thanks Jason very helpful

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EinName

Participant

Hi,

I've got the same problem too and it doesn't matter how many undo-steps I've configured. Closing other Fireworks documents and other running programs gives you 2 or 3 more edit steps until the error message appears again. According to Task-Manager Fireworks only uses not more than 400 MB of my 3,24 GB memory (Win XP SP3)

My Document:

10 Pages, 10 to 20 Styles, 15 Layers (mostly shared), ca. 205 objects with groups (ungrouped ca. 500)

Every 2 hours Fireworks needs a restart.

It seems to be a very very strongheaded bug, because it's reported from users since CS3 (afaIk). But I'm very thankful. In CS5 at least I can save my work after the error message appears.

I don't give up hope, that someday this bug (and many others) will be fixed.

@Adobe: Is a bugfixing-update on schedule (in the near future)?

Regards

optimiced

Participating Frequently

For Fireworks, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have installed -- it handles memory in a very specific manner, and cannot use more than ~ 2 GB of RAM. Once this memory is exausted for it, Fw will become instable.

My suggestions -- to avoid this kind of problem:

1) Reduce number of UNDO steps to approx. 100. (this can be set in Preferences)

2) When working with large files and/or with many files, periodically restart Fireworks (after a few hours of extensive work), wait until Fireworks.exe disappears from running processes, then start it again.

Working in this manner will probably make this error never appear...