Fireworks CS6 - Still the same memory issues and crashes.

[Andrej_Balaz]

I had hoped that the inability to save even the simplest documents due to a range of errors from "Unable to complete your request. An error occured", to "Not enough memory", to "Error Code 80000001) would be fixed.

Adobe is completely ignoring their best design solution for mobile application design, now over 5 years!

I am working on a document that has 12 42x42 icons and nothing else, still I cannot save my document half of the time. The tool is unusable as is. It is highly unstable and endangers work, not to speak about the frustration it causes me.

My Fireworks hardly uses more than 300MB of memory, still hitting ctrl+s almost always results in an error. It is impossible to work longer than 30 minutes without needing to restart the tool.

My version is CS6 with the Creatve Cloud.

My computer is an i7 Win 7 x64 PC with 16GB of ram and a SSD disk configuration. My system is not the issue.

I am highly dissapointed by Adobe once again.

[motionman95]

Wow, this is so odd. I'm using CS6 and am experiencing NOTHING like this. In fact (in 32-bit), the experience has improved in terms of speed and reliability. I wonder exactly what configurations by Adobe lead to such terrible results in x64?

[Andrej_Balaz]

Are you using styles, symbols, pages and states? I think that once you start using any of those, the document pretty much breaks at some point. I cannot save more than half of the times. Nothing helps, nor restarting the app, nor setting processor affinity to one core, nor reinstalling. I am running FW CS5 and CS6 as parallel installations. In fact instead of getting an error message like usual in CS5, the CS6 sometimes simply just crashes on save.

[Andrej_Balaz]

By the way, FW is still a 32 bit app. They have just increased some caps for 64 bit systems, nothing revolutionary happened. I wonder why Fireworks is not in focus for Adobe. Photoshop is too desorganized for proper application design and lacking vectors, whereas Illustrator is simply too slow when texturing vectors or creating states.

[Andrej_Balaz]

I have attached an image. Memory is not the issue here. There is something deeply wrong with the SAVING in Fireworks since CS3.

[motionman95]

Yep - styles, pages, symbols and all. It's really messed up that adobe hasn't given Fireworks the proper attention. Have you tried any sort of emulator, compatibiliity modes, etc.?

[Andrej_Balaz]

So far I have only tried to delete the whole preferences file of Fireworks. Problem persists. I really don't know why.

[Andrej_Balaz]

I have read somewhere, that Fireworks can access only the FIRST 2-3GB of system memory. Since I have such a large amount of system memory and almost always running several adobe applications at once, I am wondering if that could be the issue. However, only an Adobe developer could help with that.

[motionman95]

You may want to look at this - at the very least, you can get a better idea of what's causing the problem. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/192876/set-windows-process-or-user-memory-limit/1289945#1289945

[Daryl Barnes]

Andrej Balaz wrote:

I have read somewhere, that Fireworks can access only the FIRST 2-3GB of system memory. Since I have such a large amount of system memory and almost always running several adobe applications at once, I am wondering if that could be the issue. However, only an Adobe developer could help with that.

Yes, that is exactly the problem.  Because Fireworks is a 32bit application, it is only the first 2 to 3 GB that Fireworks can access.  And of course there are likely other apps running trying to take some of that initial 2-3 GBs of RAM as well.  It doesn't matter how much RAM you have in total. 

The other reason for your problem is the way Windows handle memory management.  OS X on the Mac handles memory a lot better so even if you have a lot of RAM used up by other apps already, once you open up Fireworks the OS does a good job of freeing up the necessary memory it needs.  Windows doesn't seem to handle this as well.

[BSS]

This SHOULD be the case. But FW documents "run out of memory" at 300mb - 700mb. Actually 700 mb is usually the max we can use before we get the dreaded errors.

I have 24Gb of RAM!!! I SHOULD be able to access at the minimum 2gb given it's a 32-bit app. But that just isn't the case.

Something fundamental about FW needs to change.

I have had to build an Extension that fakes the functionality of Pages and States and saves them as seperate documents so that we can avoid this drama at work. NOT ACCEPTABLE ADOBE!!!

I have built a plugin that helps track memory performance of Fireworks... saves us about 80% of the time when it comes to crashes. I might see if work will allow me to make it public.

[niduma]

i can't understand why adobe treats its only wireframing and screendesign application this bad. the error in your screenshot exists now more than five years, and none of the two guys of the fireworks programming team seems to care. they probably only work the last week before a new release to update the splasscreen and icons.

most of the innovation of the last 3 releases did come from third party extensions developers and user suggestions. that's fine but at least adobe should take care of the bugs.

well, irony can help to overcome all this.

[Guest]

Since these products cost hundreds or thousands of dollars/euros/pounds, this is something that is unacceptable. If I had a Mac, I would be using Sketch, that's true, but are there any good alternatives to this Adobe BS on Windows? I can only think of Expression Studio, which is pretty solid.

[lazypixelmachine]

On the Windows side I would concur, Espression Studio is surprisingly solid.

[lazypixelmachine]

I've been using Fireworks since Macromedia's first beta. I love(d) Fireworks until Adobe started butchering and neglecting it.  But for some reason I have continued using Fireworks despite its numerous flaws and neglect by Adobe. CS6 is the final straw for me. 

It has clear to me that Adobe is not going to allocate the resources necessary to clean up Fireworks. Not now, not ever. We're pretty much at the point where the Fireworks needs a rewrite anyway as it has become a bloated mess of half-complete marketing features, sort of like Photoshop. (At least Photoshop is 64-bit though.)

Although I won't be able to replace Photoshop and InDesign anytime in the near future, I am having spectacular results with some Fireworks alternatives.  Bohemian Software's Sketch 2.0 and Pixelmator 2.01 are going places. I do not think that either is quite ready to replace Fireworks on my system yet, but they are almost there. For the most part though, I am using Sketch 2.0 for a good 80% of the work I typically do in Fireworks. The speed and responsiveness of these two programs alone is unbelievable at first when you come from a Fireworks background. The developers of said programs are also very active in communicating with their users.

I suggest that all of you, who are able, should start investigating your own alternatives to Fireworks. You are creative professionals and shouldn't have to deal with wonky software getting in the way of your creativity, your workflow.

I wish you all the best.

[niduma]

@lazypixelmachine thanks for the sketch tip. i looked at it when 1.o came out and found it not quite ready. i will test it again and report back how it did. besides that i completely agree with you. as you said, we are creative professionals but adobe is doing a terribly amateurish job. that's what frustrates me the most.

[mzetlitz]

@lazypixelmachine It is a really liberating reading your posts, they voice my feelings to the pinpoint.

Been a long Fireworks fan, also since early Macromedia stages. I as well can't replace Adobe (Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop) entirely, but I realize it is going to a painful workflow transition sooner than later. In order to deliver high quality to clients, I am in need of a working software that mirrors professional. It is sure nice that the frustration that has been built up since around CS3 is not just me being a baby about things.

CS6 is also the final straw for me. So thanks again for heads up. I rather spend some hours changing my workflow than continue paying and hope for a change (I have been since at least around 2007).

[Andrej_Balaz]

We can console ourselves as much as we want. Adobe has only one proper solution for prototyping and multi-screen layout of interfaces - Fireworks. If Adobe chooses to ignore the paying interface design community, just as they do in this forum, where employee contact is a rarity, we will go elsewhere, that is obvious. It is simply unacceptable that Adobe is unwilling to invest into tools for interface design in the smartphone era.

Addition to my issue:

I have found out that closing the Styles palette considerably lowers the error count in my project. I hope I am not hallucinating but it seems to help.

I have also discovered a new bug. Sometimes when the document crashes while saving, Fireworks replaces the document with a blank one - making all your work dissapear. I strongly recommend backing up frequently. It has saved my job two times already.

[Graugans GbR]

Ive been working with FW today, about 10 hours continously, it crashes three times and had problems to save two times. Im using two different files to save to, aftr having a corrupt file due to a saving crash. I dont know whether this is good or bad. Its annoying, but I could live with it. BUT what really makes me angry are these little sloppy bugs all over the app. Circles look somehow weird, the dropshadow cant be used, color management causes headache. I need some sort of workaround for almost every little working step.

Not to mention the slowness and delays in my workflow, i. e. when opening the preview window to check out a hover or when waiting for the inspector to react.

I guess, they where just not ready programming, when Adobe launched CS6. Im quit sure, all the issues will be fixed till summer with the next update. They are working on it 🙂

[niduma]

don't put any hope in it that those bugs will be corrected this summer. all those exists since many years and nobody at the fireworks team seems to care about it. the workflow of fireworks would great and fast if the interface response could keep up with the speed of the user.

i really doubt that the fireworks team is working on anything between new releases. i know it is provocative to say that but it seems like that after every new release. if you look at the list of changes for cs6 it is quite apparent that most of them are small tweaks to improve the workflow but only one handles performance issues and only few actually correct drawing issues. and even the mentioned perforformance improvements sound like a workaround for somthing that is completely wrong at the core of fireworks.

http://helpx.adobe.com/fireworks/using/whats-new-cs6.html

[Graugans GbR]

We must put all our problems on the wishlist of Fireworks and then post continously at the Fireworks Facebook page, as this is red by a lot of people and Adobe has to react somehow. There are also a few well known professionals out there, like Jim Babbage for example, wonder what they say to that issue?

[Andrej_Balaz]

Adobe is avoiding any feedback in this matter. Right now I cannot save a file with Fireworks using 190MB of memory! This is insane.

[Jim_Babbage]

I honestly do not run into the glut of problems people seem to experience. I get the "occasional" hang, but Word crashes on me more often than FW.

Once in a while, FW tells me it can't save a file because it's in use elsewhere (and it's not in use elsewhere). In those situations, a resave works.

I am in the habit (not because of Fireworks) of saving files often, so I might be avoiding some of the issues mentioned here.

I'm on a MacBook Pro, using Snow Leopard - have not upgraded to Lion yet.

It can be hard to track down issues, too. For example, I know one user who has three identical Windows systems, yet only one of those systems is plagued with problems when using Fireworks.

The dev team for Fireworks is a dedicated - but small - team. They genuinely want to produce a solid product and do their best to address issues - legacy and new - in each release. They can't get to all of them in one go, unfortunately.

You can help by reporting issues WITH details to the Adobe wishlist. The wish list IS read by Adobe (unlike this user-to-user forum) and is almost like a form of triage. The more common a problem is (highly reported), and the better documented those problems are, the more likely they are to bubble up to the top where they can be worked on by the dev team.

Here's the URL:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

HTH

[motionman95]

Excellent! Thanks Jim - for the link and informative, dedicated comment. Also I think this is an issue isolated to PC 64bit.

[Back40Data]

I have a fairly nice Dell with a 2.93Ghz dual core, 4GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 9300 on Win7SP1...not going to knock your socks off but runs any other graphics program just fine. Now, even when I use CS6 on my Lenovo D10, dual 3.0G XEON Quad Core with 16GB RAM and a 768mb FX4600 card on Win7SP1 64bit and get the same thing, well there's a problem.