I want to make an animation and I need to know how many frames or GiB I can have in one file without the issue of Krita not loading the data.
When I made an animation one year ago I had to split one animation, a walk cycle, into several Krita files, because when the file is too big or I have too many frames it just says that the file couldn't be loaded. My current project is in 1440*1080 @ 24.

The more important consideration is the amount of PC memory that the animation occupies when loaded into krita. A .kra file is stored with data compression of each layer (and each frame of an animated layer) and so is much smaller than the amount of memory it uses when loaded.

Also, the content and complexity of the content of a layer/frame will affect how much the data can be compressed before it is stored in the .kra file. If your animation has two active layers, this will use twice as much memory storage space and about twice as much file storage (depending on content/complexity).

I don't know if krita has a hard internal limit of the number of frames you can have but I suspect that in the past you've hit the intermal memory limit rather than a frame limit.

When you had to split the animation, can you remember the file sizes involved (probably not very important) and the amount of PC memory used in krita? The amount of memory used is shown on the bottom of the krita window.

On Settings -> Configure Krita -> Performance - General tab, you can adjust the amount of memory available to krita, out of your computer's total memory.
If you have enough spare memory, you could try to increase this.

I'd suggest that when creating an animation that you note the amount of memory used by krita and try not to go too close to the upper limit that has been configured for it.

A developer may be aware of any additional limitations for animations.

I opened the last file that is 61.2 MB big. Loaded in the memory it' 2.6 GiB. 4 Layers 265 Frames. I tried to play it back but it closed during loading. Even after increasing the memory size to 13 GiB it closes.

Can you share the file with me so I can do some testing?

Sorry, my mistake, i didn't wait until all images were loaded. But i remember when a file had over 90 MB it gave me that error message. That doesn't matter however. I just want to know what maximum file size is save to use.

Well, that's the problem: it depends on your system. There are no hard-coded limits.

My system is an i7 8700K and a Geforce GTX 1060 6G and 16 GB of memory. I know that my memory limit I defined in Krita is the upper limit but I don't want to not be able to open a file because it is too big.

As an experimental action, can you go to Settings -> Configure Krita -> Performance - Animation Cache tab and set the Cache Storage Backend to be In-memory instead of On-disk? Then go the General tab and reduce the Memory Limit to about 50%. This will need a restart of krita to take effect. This might have a beneficial effect or it might not. If not then change those settings back to their previous values.

hi im using the 4.1.7 ver and im trying to select the on-disk but it is greyed out. i'm unable to change option. it is fixed on the 'on-memory' ram...can someone help please.

@jonathanchen It's the same situation on my Windows 10 system. This may be a Windows thing, for some reason, but it would need a krita developer to confirm this.

We had to disable the on-disk cache on Windows because of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401326 -- and we haven't had time to fix that bug yet.

thanks for the response!