PS not releaseing RAM when files are closed.

I'm running Photoshop 7. My system is a P4 with 1GB RAM in it. When I run Photoshop, it often push the RAM to the
limit. The Task Manager shows Page Usage of 1.2 GB. That's practical and fine if PS has several big images open or I'm doing a lot of editing. What I don't like is the RAM usage just stays that high when editing is done and images are closed. Because of that, any further editing on a newly opened image tend to be slow. I often exit PS, That
releases much of the memory. The Page Usage would drop to 500 or 600 MB. Then I restart PS to work.

What I want to achieve is when I close all edited image
files, that means I'm done with them. PS should trash
what's in its memory space and release the memory.

Have you tried going to Edit>Purge>All? I do agree with you that it should free up much more of the RAM when files are closed.

Peadge :-)

"JoeyB" wrote in message

I'm running Photoshop 7. My system is a P4 with 1GB RAM in it. When I run Photoshop, it often push the RAM to the
limit. The Task Manager shows Page Usage of 1.2 GB. That's practical and fine if PS has several big images open or I'm doing a lot of editing. What I don't like is the RAM usage just stays that high when editing is done and images are closed. Because of that, any further editing on a newly opened image tend to be slow. I often exit PS, That
releases much of the memory. The Page Usage would drop to 500 or 600 MB. Then I restart PS to work.

What I want to achieve is when I close all edited image
files, that means I'm done with them. PS should trash
what's in its memory space and release the memory.

"JoeyB" wrote in message

I'm running Photoshop 7. My system is a P4 with 1GB RAM in it. When I run Photoshop, it often push the RAM to the
limit. The Task Manager shows Page Usage of 1.2 GB. That's practical and fine if PS has several big images open or I'm doing a lot of editing. What I don't like is the RAM usage just stays that high when editing is done and images are closed. Because of that, any further editing on a newly opened image tend to be slow. I often exit PS, That
releases much of the memory. The Page Usage would drop to 500 or 600 MB. Then I restart PS to work.

What I want to achieve is when I close all edited image
files, that means I'm done with them. PS should trash
what's in its memory space and release the memory.

This is in line with my own experiments on both Macintosh and Windows. Photoshop should releast its memory, which is to say it doesn't. Although there are others here who could explain this better than I, this strange behavior is rooted in the fact that PhotoShop emulates the behavior of pre OSX Macintosh memory handling, which does not include true virtual memory.

OTOH, with real virtual memory it doesn't really matter. Other programs can use the RAM, even though PhotoShop retains the address space. --

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net