how can i increase my performance in photoshop?

[rjcoolpix880]

I use photoshop all the time and my files have been getting larger and larger recently. they range from 30-400mb closed(its larger when open) the average file size is around 30-40MB. The most common things that bogs my system down are saving and resizing. I dont know if they are a function of the harddrive, memory, or processor. I have a WD800JB hd, 512 MB of Corsair XMS 2100, and a 1.4 tbird oc'd to around 1.75. I intentionally bought fast stuff to begin with for this reason, but it is getting slow. I plan on getting another 512 of ram but could the slowdown possibly be from anything else?

 

[Dug]

You need more memory. Get more than 512. Get at least a gig and a 1/2.

400mb is really large for a Photoshop file. Are you sure you aren't saving unnecessary information?

 

[Regs]

Yeah, get more memory and inrease the scratch sizes. The ammount of memory is key, but also how fast the data moves on the memory bus. So the faster your bus speed, the more performance you'll gain like in many other situations.

 

[Kaido]

RAM is the biggest thing. If you're serious about Photoshop, get at least a gig, if not a gig and a half. I run 3D apps alongside Photoshop, and a gig and a half works wonders.

If you have the money, also invest in a fast hard drive, at least 7200rpm with an 8mb cache. There have been pretty good deals on the 74gb 10000rpm WD Raptor hard drives lately (SATA)...one of those would help boost your speed.

Also, what kind of video card do you have? That's an important factor for screen redraw and whatnot. I dropped a Radeon 9600xt in my system earlier this year and I can run full-resolution display in Illustrator a lot better.

What version of Photoshop do you use? I have Photoshop CS, and it's slow to load up even on my 2.8ghz/512mb ram/80gb home computer.

 

[rjcoolpix880]

dug: it was a print for work at an architecture firm that they could plot out around 24x36

you all are saying that i should spend $230 on a gig more of ram. i could get a 2.2Ghz Athlon and 512 mb for that price which seems like it would be more usefull. rember that 40mb is the typical file size i deal with.

Kaido: i have a 8mb 7200 rpm hd. and a Geforce4 ti4200 128mb, but i thought that only really delt with 3d stuff. i use photoshop 7.

 

[oldfart]

Originally posted by: rjcoolpix880
dug: it was a print for work at an architecture firm that they could plot out around 24x36

you all are saying that i should spend $230 on a gig more of ram. i could get a 2.2Ghz Athlon and 512 mb for that price which seems like it would be more usefull. rember that 40mb is the typical file size i deal with.

Yeah, but every time you edit, it is put in to scratch memory. Fiddle around a bit and that 40 M file is using 5 x that. How much memory do you allow PS to use (in preferences)?
When you are bogging down, what does device manager show about CPU, mem and swap usage?

 

[thirdlegstump]

also layers can easily double up or more the size of a ps file as well as mem usage.
I have a gig of ram in my system and it's quite oright unless I have a few apps open with a pretty complex ps file.

 

[mikecel79]

Originally posted by: Kaido
RAM is the biggest thing. If you're serious about Photoshop, get at least a gig, if not a gig and a half. I run 3D apps alongside Photoshop, and a gig and a half works wonders.

If you have the money, also invest in a fast hard drive, at least 7200rpm with an 8mb cache. There have been pretty good deals on the 74gb 10000rpm WD Raptor hard drives lately (SATA)...one of those would help boost your speed.

Also, what kind of video card do you have? That's an important factor for screen redraw and whatnot. I dropped a Radeon 9600xt in my system earlier this year and I can run full-resolution display in Illustrator a lot better.

What version of Photoshop do you use? I have Photoshop CS, and it's slow to load up even on my 2.8ghz/512mb ram/80gb home computer.

Actually changing the video card will provide him with no performance improvement in Photoshop. A modern video card (anything made in the last 4 years actually) can draw a 2d image on the screen faster than the data can be supplied to it. Photoshop relies more on the CPU, memory amount, memory bandwith, and hard drive than the video card. You could even use integrated graphics and see no performance hit.

Now if he were working with a 3D program that uses OpenGL or DirectX a video card would help.

 

[Viper96720]

Yep more ram

 

[Adul]

More ram. faster HD. then cpu


my bro runs a GB of ram on his system and his is starting to hit another bottle neck. He is ready to go over to 2GB soon.

 

[Viper96720]

I saw a mac bench somewhere person used up 512mb-8gb of ram. Pretty much each increase in ram gave better photoshop results.
Found it
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G5/8GB_RAM_Tests/G5_8GB_ram_tests.html

 

[zephyrprime]

rember that 40mb is the typical file size i deal with.

The file size alone is an inaccurate indication of how much memory you're using. The image is going to be uncompressed while it's in memory. Take a look at taskmanager. Unfortunately, taskmanager can't say how much scratch memory you're using.

 

[gnumantsc]

I say go dual opteron with 2 gigs of ram and 72 gig raptor HDs or get a dual core G5 processor

The extra cache from the AMD 64s should help much more than the older thunderbird's

 

[rjcoolpix880]

haha

 

[Jiggz]

RAM, ram, and more rams. You can have all the cpu processing power but with low ram, you will always have to wait for the hdd to deliver the data!

 

[rjcoolpix880]

while i plan on getting more ram to handle larger files, i found something interesting ladt night:

I was drawing in ps with the task manager open to see what was going on as zephyrprime suggested. I found that when i draw a line, the CPU maxes out! I have a Wacom tablet so the computer has to calculate pressure. When i was drawing with a big brush (400px) it was nearly unuseable because it would lag behind for 30 seconds. keep in mind this is with the spacing set to around 7, 25 is default (ps actually draws a bunch of dots that overlap to get a line, the more dots, the smoother the line and gradation).

i also noted that the 40MB files are typically around 70-140MB when opened.

 

[sparks]

Another thing that will help performance is a second physical HD for your scratch files.

 

[Sideswipe001]

Well, it's pretty much agreed overall that more RAM will help. I know it's made a big difference in some of the computers here at work (I'm the IT guy, making sure everyone's computers keep working happily) and most of our people use Photoshop.

I will say that the CPU helps a lot, though. One of our employees has a 1 Ghz duron as her desktop computer (with 384 MB RAM). She never uses photoshop on it anymore - she goes to the graphics room to a 2 Ghz P4 with 1 GB of RAM. It's night and day difference - she opens files like yours (up to 400 MB sometimes, usually closer to 40 MB) and the 2 GHz P4 is easily 5x quicker at Photoshop. Opening or saving some files on her desktop system takes up to 5 mins (!!!!) sometimes.

 

[So]

Originally posted by: sparks
Another thing that will help performance is a second physical HD for your scratch files.

Yes.

 

[rjcoolpix880]

i allready have the scratch on a different hd but it is a slower ~5200 rpm one. i never really understood what the scratch disks do anyway, but it tells you to put them on a different hd so i did.

 

[trexpesto]

Originally posted by: rjcoolpix880
i allready have the scratch on a different hd but it is a slower ~5200 rpm one. i never really understood what the scratch disks do anyway, but it tells you to put them on a different hd so i did.

I believe the idea is that you are not limited by the io limits of a single drive; because there is only so much that a single hd can do at once, this helps photoshop avoid read/write conflicts so the disk io is less of a bottleneck. The fact they call it scratch suggests they are writing backups there, automated or not, but they may be using it as swap space aka "virtual memory" as well, for when your memory is not big enough to do things it will write it out there. So a faster scratch drive might help as well. After memory.

I am just guessing.

 

[Viper96720]

scratch drive is like vm. Get's used when you run out of physical memory.

 

[Gortnicktu]

Originally posted by: rjcoolpix880
i allready have the scratch on a different hd but it is a slower ~5200 rpm one. i never really understood what the scratch disks do anyway, but it tells you to put them on a different hd so i did.

More RAM, there I said it too.

Scratch/temp/swap files are virtual memory, and much much slower than RAM. You don't want to write-to-disc (create s/t/s files) unless you have to. Translation, if you have enough installed memory to accomodate the open file, you won't need to write-to-disc.

Other than allocating more memory to PS in preferences, the best thing you can do is lower the number of history state settings. The default setting is 20, which is huge. Set it from 3-5.

Histories are records of previous file states. When your file is big, or has lots of layers, you get very big histories being stored in memory. The more of them there are, the more memory is being consumed. So, lower the number of history states the lower the amount of memory allocated to "undos."

More RAM is good too