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.
Hi there
I’m using APP on my i5 laptop which is pretty slow.
Since I work in IT, the idea came up to let a Windows Virtual Machine on Azure do the work.
Now I have to choose a machine type and have some questions:
-Is there a benefit of choosing a machine with a powerful GPU?
-Does it make sense to use more then 32 Cores or is there an upper limit?
I’m currently aiming for a “F32s v2” with 32 Cores, 64GB RAM and 256GB Storage, which would cost me around 3$/hour.
GPU isn't as beneficial no, I would focus on the amount of cores. In principle there is no huge limit to the amount of cores as far as I know. Keep us posted as this is an interesting way of processing for sure. Does it use SSD for storage? That will also benefit processing.
Huh, I definitely want to follow this thread. Good idea.
In fact, this could be a potential revenue stream for Aries. You could offer a subscription service, with or without a surcharge based on usage. You can offer computing resources far exceeding what anyone is likely to buy for themselves without making a capital investment, and the latest APP will always be installed. (Hey, someday that's gonna be a thing again, right?!!)
If APP someday better utilizes GPUs, shazaam, all the subscribers can enjoy better performance without having to buy new computers or upgrade their graphics cards. You could alpha-test new features without having to create production-ready installers, and you can upgrade the alpha continually -- no need to make users wait for The One Big Release. If Mabula gets something mostly working, it can go up on the alpha service right away and users can try it out. That alone might quiet some of the clamoring for new releases.
Hell, you could offer consulting services to help people process their data if you wanted. User support, too -- debugging problems is a ton easier if you're both looking at the same machine instead of emailing problem descriptions and data back and forth.
I like the idea of "stacking as a service" but there's a lot to be considered to run and monetise such a service.
I did a short test with one of my sessions.
Camera: D5300 (24MP, ~20MB per file)
Lights: 114
Flats: 47
Darks: 40
DarkFlats: 54
Stacking with default APP settings on my i5, 8GB RAM Laptop took one hour and 43 minutes.
With a F64s V2 ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/fsv2-series ) 128GB RAM it took 54 minutes, nearly halft the time.
I'll try some different machines and analyse the consumption oft the different resources in the different steps.
Maybe a Lsv2 with local attached NVMe storage will bring some speed. Creating a RAM-drive for all files on a FX48mds (1TB RAM) is worth a test. A HB120rs v3 with 120 non-hyperthreaded cores could also be interesting,...
I'll keep you updated.
Yes, and what I always forget.. you also need to up- and download all your data. That alone can be quite problematic. Thanks for testing, very interesting!
