Photoshop memory usage...

[homercles337]

My machine here are work has 4GB installed (only 3.1 effective, of course). I do some heavy photoshop work with >500 million pixel images, but photoshop never uses more than 1GB. In fact, at this exact moment there are 2.1GB available and photoshop is at 927MB. It would be nice if i could get photoshop to actually use more than 1GB. Any ideas or am i stuck?

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Photoshop (assuming you're using 7.0 or greater) uses the Windows memory manager to determine ram usage. It can access up to 2GB of physical ram but there's no way to manually control how much it will use. The only thing you can control in that general realm is the size of the scratch disk.

 

[Nothinman]

Since you're running a 32-bit app there's only 4G of VM to go around and the kernel steals 2G of that, 1G if you use the /3GB kernel switch, and some of that is going to be used by the binary itself, memory mapped files, shared libraries, etc so you end up with less than 2G. I wouldn't have expected it to be need a full 1G before opening a file but it's possible. If you want you can try booting with the /3GB switch and see if that helps. If not you might need to mark the binary large address aware since by default Windows still restricts each process to 2G even with the /3GB switch.