CS swapfile behavior question and recommendation request

BL
Posted By
Bill_Lamp
Feb 23, 2004
Views
331
Replies
6
Status
Closed
I am using the Photoshop-CS trial and am trying to "tune" my XP-Home 3/4 gig chip memory AMD XP-1700+ system. Hard drive space is not a problem after swapping out an 80 gig. (HD-0 IDE port 0) for a 250 and the 80 will replace HD-1 (currently 40 gig. on IDE port 1). Both HD-0 & HD-1 will be ATA-100 drives when this is complete.

Question 1: I noticed that after running CS there suddenly was a large space "Reserved for System Use" at the top of the main PS swap file partition. Everything had been moved down to make room for this empty space. I have only seen this after installing CS-Trial. Is this hidden file re-arangement normal? Could this explain some of the apparent slow down of CS as compared to 7 as it re-locates 20-30 gigabytes of existing data? I sure did see a speed change between the first time I ran CS and the second time (faster response). A reboot followed by a defrag removed most of the "reserved" space and the third use of CS was again slow going.

Question two: I will be setting up a dedicated PS swapfile partition. At the present time, the largest files I work with are 90 meg and I don’t recall having had more than three open at any one time. Three is very rare.

With an over abundance of drive space (the price after rebate was below the cost of the 160 originally planned) what size swapfile partition do you recommend?

Thank you,
Bill
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behavior question recommendation request

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L
leppod
Feb 24, 2004
Good Question! I have an abundance of HD space myself, and set up a drive with 10 GB entirely for Photoshop.
I suspect it is far more than I will ever need, however I do work a lot with layers and very large files. It would be
interesting to hear what others have to say, as I could never find any info on this.

Leppod~

wrote in message
I am using the Photoshop-CS trial and am trying to "tune" my XP-Home 3/4
gig chip memory AMD XP-1700+ system. Hard drive space is not a problem after swapping out an 80 gig. (HD-0 IDE port 0) for a 250 and the 80 will replace HD-1 (currently 40 gig. on IDE port 1). Both HD-0 & HD-1 will be ATA-100 drives when this is complete.
Question 1: I noticed that after running CS there suddenly was a large
space "Reserved for System Use" at the top of the main PS swap file partition. Everything had been moved down to make room for this empty space. I have only seen this after installing CS-Trial. Is this hidden file re-arangement normal? Could this explain some of the apparent slow down of CS as compared to 7 as it re-locates 20-30 gigabytes of existing data? I sure did see a speed change between the first time I ran CS and the second time (faster response). A reboot followed by a defrag removed most of the "reserved" space and the third use of CS was again slow going.
Question two: I will be setting up a dedicated PS swapfile partition. At
the present time, the largest files I work with are 90 meg and I don’t recall having had more than three open at any one time. Three is very rare.
With an over abundance of drive space (the price after rebate was below
the cost of the 160 originally planned) what size swapfile partition do you recommend?
Thank you,
Bill
CC
Chris_Cox
Feb 24, 2004

1) Sounds like something the OS is doing, not Photoshop.

2) As much as you can afford. Just so the one time you want to use 200 layers, it’ll work without any problems…..
BL
Bill_Lamp
Feb 24, 2004
Chris,

I defragment the drives once a week. This is the first time I have seen that happen and the computer has been in use well over a year. No software added/removed or settings were changed (except for CS-Trial being installed and run) between the last normal defrag and the one with the odd thing happening. That includes XP-critical updates. The partition involved was set to be the primary swapfile use partition for v 6 now 7.01 and CS-Trial.

This was with the original drive layout (80 & 40) not the changed one (250 & 80). I haven’t run CS since I made the 40->80 drive change over last night.

200 layers (shudder) I haven’t gone past around 8-15 ("texture patches" to eliminate very small areas of blown highlight on a white sandstone cliff) without merging to keep things under control. I’ll use Partition Magic (current edition) to finish the job Ghost did last night and give it 20 gig (or nearest higher boundary).

Off this Topic, if I avoid using the file browser, I don’t see much slowdown that couldn’t be explained by working with 16-bit layers and the larger files. The speed doing the same things to similar bit depth files seems to be about equal to V 7.01.

Bill, waiting to reconfigure HD:1, Device:0, Port:01 and next payday to order the CS upgrade. The trial edition does make enough things I do easier and does them better than 7.
FN
Fred_Nirque
Feb 25, 2004
Bill,

I’ll take a stab at this being what you’re seeing – when I use O&O Defrag Pro, it displays a similar "reserved" space for the Master File Table. My guess is that this is allocated when formatting an NTFS partition, see the nuts & bolts here:

<http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_basics.htm>

I’ve noticed that when the space is needed by CS or any other app, this section is written to regardless – it appears not to be a locked out space. It sure wasn’t there when I ran FAT 32 partitions in an earlier, more traumatic life with 98 & ME.

Fred.
BL
Bill_Lamp
Feb 25, 2004
Fred,

Yes, that was on a NTFS partition. But again, it was only after installing and using CS-Trial that it showed up. Perhaps it is MTF space and the many small clusters makes for a HUGE file table once CS creates it’s large swap file with layered 16-bit files.

If that is the case, it is another reason to go ahead with my plans to format the Photoshop Swap Partition in FAT32. I was planning on doing that to use the larger cluster size to speed up large data read/writes. It looks as if it will also be more space effective.

Thanks for the heads up on inflateing MTFs.

Bill
FN
Fred_Nirque
Feb 26, 2004
Bill,

In previous threads Chris has mentioned an as yet undiagnosed problem with FAT 32 scratch disks & CS – though I think that was more a problem with 2K. You might bear that in mind.

As to your scratch disk size – I regularly see scratch sizes of 12GB when working with 150MB files and a few layers (rarely more than 5). My dedicated scratch partition is 18GB, with a second (not dedicated) of about 18GB available in the (perhaps) unlikely event of topping out the first.

CS loves scratch space, it would appear.

Fred.

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