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Question

Clarification on Figmas Memory usage

  • August 12, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 5488 views
Jon_Sandstrom

I am trying to understand how Figmas memory limitations work in order to give recommendations on file structure. As far as i understand the only limitation Figma has is 2GB active memory. On THIS page it is suggested that we split large documents with multiple pages into smaller documents in order to reduce memory usage.

However it seems that Figma does not load all pages into memory at once as some type of loading (or possibly just rendering) occurs when switching between pages. if this is the case then we should not have to split a document into many as only the active page has to be kept in memory. In our case we would like to avoid having to manage branches and permissions across multiple files unless there is good reason.

So how much memory do we actually save by splitting the pages of a document into multiple files? And what are the memory mechanism behind this? are the memory savings directly proportional to the sum of memory usage of the individual pages?

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3 replies

ntfromchicago

I am not sure this is accurate, at least in Chrome. You can open up the Task Manager in Chrome to test for yourself. The memory footprint of a Figma file doesn’t seem to change significantly when backgrounded.

I think the main benefit of splitting files is that it reduces the risk of you hitting that 2GB limit for a single file, and decreasing the load time and rendering lag you may feel with larger files.

Jon_Sandstrom

I did try to look at the task manager briefly, but found it difficult to deduce how memory was being used, which is why I’m asking for clarifications. No doubt Figma has some optimizations to avoid keeping too much information in memory, but i suspect this is more intricate than just loading the entire file immediately.

For example, i made a stress test with lots of copied rectangles, and when no operation was made on them the memory usage was fairly low. it was only when i interacted with them that the memory usage grew to 2GB.

I wish this would be better documented since this is not a limitation you’d normally have in other graphics software. I work with large teams with many stakeholders and this has an impact on how we choose to structure our projects.

Tricia_Sakai
angyixin
Janne_Yliruusi
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  • September 15, 2021

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