Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Mabula
I have been doing a lot of wide field work with a 135mm lens on my Canon 80D recently. I've adjusted the 'analyze stars' settings to keep the counted stars around 1500 - at the default settings it is usually 2500-3000 which bogs things down even more.
Star analysis, Registration, Normalization all take a reasonable amount of time. But stacking the final image can take more than an hour in some cases. Granted, I'm working with 150-250 subs in most cases, but I was wondering if this is normal.
I'm running on an Intel i7 8 core processor, 8GB of ram - with 6 allocated to APP.
I'm also doing a lot of processing of CMOS deep field data, and that runs much much faster than these stacks. Often I have 100+ subs in those sessions also.
Is there a way to optimize the settings to speed up the process without losing any significant quality? I imagine that just reducing the number of subs would be a good place to start, but is there anything else?
Thank you, I'm loving APP over my old DSS workflow!
Eric
Hi Eric,
Thank you for your question and welcome to the APP forum 😉
Yes, integration speed for large stacks is an issue and was reported by several other users in the past few weeks. If you have your working directory on an SSD, things will be much faster with the APP version that you have (1.054 probably ?). But if the working directory is on a conventional drive, then with an increasing amount of frames, the integration becomes really slow. ;-(
But good news, this will be fixed in the next APP release. Integration speed on conventional drives has been improved with a huge factor ( almost 20x). On SSD drives the speed will be higher as well but not so dramatic.
You can read all about it here:
In short:
integration of 100x 16megapixel RGB frames took almost 2 hours on a conventional drive and 9 minutes on a really fast SSD drive.
In the new implementation, time to integrate was reduced to only 7 minutes (from 142 minutes, so a speed increase with a factor of 20x ! ) on the conventional drive and 6 minutes on the SSD drive.
And these tests were performed with only 4GB memory allocated to APP and only 4 cpu threads.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Awesome! Looking forward to the new release so I can crank out more finished photons - I gather so many they are stacking up around the house like unread magazines full of amazing content!
Estimated release date?
Thanks again,
Eric
Hi Eric,
Next release will probably be within a couple of days now 😉
Mabula
Any update on the release of 1.055? I'm trying to stack 500 frames from my ASI-1600 and it's been going for over 10 hours so far an is only 43% done. Sure could use that 20x improvement.
-Jim
