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Photoshop memory confusion

lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
edited February 20, 2004 in Finishing School
Hi, this may be the very place to solve this very annoying thing. I recently put a new hard drive in my dell (melted the old one) and re installed my ps 6. I have a 60gig hard drive with 45gig left free, and in ps I have 353878K of physical memory available and I've allocated 86% of that to ps. So why is it so slow to process, specially when I'm working with text as I am now, it never used to be like this.. driving me nuts. Going from one layer to another when creating a graphic with text in it seems to take forever.. any ideas? AND, I'm not sure what they mean by scratch disks, my first is "startup" second is C:/ and third and fourth are none. Is this what they should be?
Sorry to be so dumb.. I'm all self taught so huge lumps of info missing.
Lynn:dunno
website

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    DoctorItDoctorIt Administrators Posts: 11,951 moderator
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynn, your talking about speed. 60gb hard drive is nice, but means nothing to speed unless your working with files that are bigger than 60gb ... if you catch my drift.
    :D
    If you have a slow processor and MOST importantly not a lot of RAM, PS is going to run slowly. I would guess for PS6 to run "quickly" with the size of the files coming out of your Drebel, you want at least 256mb of RAM.

    RAM is essentially quick access memory, or "working" memory. So therefore, when working with large image files, its the size of this working memory that is the limiting factor. Make sense?
    Erik
    moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]

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    DoctorItDoctorIt Administrators Posts: 11,951 moderator
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynnma wrote:
    AND, I'm not sure what they mean by scratch disks, my first is "startup" second is C:/ and third and fourth are none. Is this what they should be?
    Sorry to be so dumb.. I'm all self taught so huge lumps of info missing.
    Lynnne_nau.gif
    Sorry, missed this part of the question. I've never messed wi the defualt settings in PS for the scratch disks. So i may be ignorant to this. My first answer was a general computer speed response.
    Erik
    moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]

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    lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    DoctorIt wrote:
    lynn, your talking about speed. 60gb hard drive is nice, but means nothing to speed unless your working with files that are bigger than 60gb ... if you catch my drift.
    :D
    If you have a slow processor and MOST importantly not a lot of RAM, PS is going to run slowly. I would guess for PS6 to run "quickly" with the size of the files coming out of your Drebel, you want at least 256mb of RAM.

    RAM is essentially quick access memory, or "working" memory. So therefore, when working with large image files, its the size of this working memory that is the limiting factor. Make sense?
    Hi Eric, I have an Intel Family 15 model 1.3 and 384 meg of ram... whaddya tink..
    website
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    DoctorItDoctorIt Administrators Posts: 11,951 moderator
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynnma wrote:
    Hi Eric, I have an Intel Family 15 model 1.3 and 384 meg of ram... whaddya tink..
    hmm. 384 shouldn't be all that slow - i expected you to answer with something like 128 (I recall you mentioning somewhere that you were still running win2000). But speed is so subjective, very hard to diagnose. All we can go by is comparison: So you just installed a new hard drive, did you upgrade to winXP at the same time by any chance? Just trying to narrow down why it seems slower to you than before...
    Erik
    moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]

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    lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    DoctorIt wrote:
    hmm. 384 shouldn't be all that slow - i expected you to answer with something like 128 (I recall you mentioning somewhere that you were still running win2000). But speed is so subjective, very hard to diagnose. All we can go by is comparison: So you just installed a new hard drive, did you upgrade to winXP at the same time by any chance? Just trying to narrow down why it seems slower to you than before...
    No, I still have win 2000. AND, if I'm doing other work and I have a couple of programs open I have to close them if I want ps to work at all efficiently... it may be cos I've allocated so much working memory to it, but if I don't it's slower!!! it's real glitchy.. not so much working with photos, cloning, layers, etc etc it's mostly a pain with creating text.
    AND, if I leave it for a minute, minimize it and come back it takes too long (for me) to re-establish most of the screen.. does yours do that?
    website
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    lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynnma wrote:
    No, I still have win 2000. AND, if I'm doing other work and I have a couple of programs open I have to close them if I want ps to work at all efficiently... it may be cos I've allocated so much working memory to it, but if I don't it's slower!!! it's real glitchy.. not so much working with photos, cloning, layers, etc etc it's mostly a pain with creating text.
    AND, if I leave it for a minute, minimize it and come back it takes too long (for me) to re-establish most of the screen.. does yours do that?
    by the way Eric... do you ever shop at Hunts Camera and Video in Hadley for camera stuff?
    website
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    DoctorItDoctorIt Administrators Posts: 11,951 moderator
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynnma wrote:
    does yours do that?
    definitely not.

    Have you tried seeing what your system is doing? Hit ctrl+alt+delete to bring up the windows task manager and then click on the performance tab. that should give you a nice running histogram of your CPU usage and PF usage. After you do that, tells us what your running (that you know of) and what the CPU and PF results were.

    This is mine running MS Outlook, winword (with my thesis open), and some other junk:
    Erik
    moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]

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    lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    DoctorIt wrote:
    definitely not.

    Have you tried seeing what your system is doing? Hit ctrl+alt+delete to bring up the windows task manager and then click on the performance tab. that should give you a nice running histogram of your CPU usage and PF usage. After you do that, tells us what your running (that you know of) and what the CPU and PF results were.

    This is mine running MS Outlook, winword (with my thesis open), and some other junk:
    o.k. thats my lesson for tomorrow... I'm off to the movies and dinner... thanks a lot Eric.
    website
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    wxwaxwxwax Registered Users Posts: 15,471 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    Why not just reset Photoshop to its default settings and see if that helps? ne_nau.gif
    Sid.
    Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
    http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
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    DoctorItDoctorIt Administrators Posts: 11,951 moderator
    edited February 19, 2004
    lynnma wrote:
    by the way Eric... do you ever shop at Hunts Camera and Video in Hadley for camera stuff?
    Do I ever... :D
    Erik
    moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]

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    hutchmanhutchman Registered Users Posts: 255 Major grins
    edited February 19, 2004
    Lynnma,


    From "Real World Photoshop 6."

    "Photoshop requires scratch disk space equal to the amount of RAM you've allocated to Photoshop - it uses RAM only as a cache for the scratch disk space. That means if you've given Photoshop 120 MB of RAM, you must also have 120 MB of free space."

    My suggestion is to divide your free RAM space in 1/2 for allocation to Photoshop. It will automatically use the remaining space for the scratch disk. If this fails to help, my next suggestion is to return all settings to default and call the help number from the website.

    Hutch
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    lynnmalynnma Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 5,207 Major grins
    edited February 20, 2004
    hutchman wrote:
    Lynnma,


    From "Real World Photoshop 6."

    "Photoshop requires scratch disk space equal to the amount of RAM you've allocated to Photoshop - it uses RAM only as a cache for the scratch disk space. That means if you've given Photoshop 120 MB of RAM, you must also have 120 MB of free space."

    My suggestion is to divide your free RAM space in 1/2 for allocation to Photoshop. It will automatically use the remaining space for the scratch disk. If this fails to help, my next suggestion is to return all settings to default and call the help number from the website.

    Hutch
    Thanks Hutch and thanks Sid, will do.
    Lynn
    website
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