Mac memory problem…

"viz" <viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au> wrote in message news:BDE3B35E.4085%viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au…

Changed over to Mac (G5 2.5, 2 Gig RAM, twin HDD) from a PII 350 (with 1 Gig
RAM and a fancy card). This thing should fly, and generally it does – however I am having difficulty with some features that I did not have before
on the PC (which incidentally was not a bad PS machine once I had identified
the bottlenecks).

When I copy and paste a picture (even a small one) onto a 20×32" 250 dpi poster (more than about 230 Mb), the Mac slows down badly, and moving the pasted picture around (either by grabbing it or inching with the arrow keys)
take up much time and HDD sounds.

Even bad-ass machines take a while to kick around half a gig of data. That is normal.

While on its face you might think I have two and a half gigs of ram copy and pasting such a piddling file should be nothing. Sorry.

Photoshop eats memory like a junkie pops pills! If you booted the system up directly and opened nothing but Photoshop and then directly opened the file and doing nothing else did the copy and paste I believe you would do much better. But that is not a realistic scenario. the fact is that each time you do something in Photoshop it creates a back up so that you can undo your action. When working with a 100 meg file that eats up your memory at an alarming rate.

My main advice is "Patience Grasshopper." 🙂 Well that and don’t experiment on a 100 megabyte file. If you are not sure what you want create a copy of your file but at 72 dpi and experiment on that and then once you have it down switch to the full file. You will save tons of time even in the short run.

For the long run you can setup some monitoring and see if you can find and eliminate any bottle necks. But most Macs are good Photoshop machines out of the box. Note managed expectations may be the key.

Of course you could be waiting several hours for your copy and past and be completely correct that something is seriously wrong. But that is for the next post. 🙂

Charles
Torrance, California
http://www.tcpslashipdomains.com Now accepting PayPal
http://www.tcpslaship.com under construction

How are your history and maximum memory set. With a 230Meg files, these will strongly effect your performance. Both set in the prefs. After chosing a maximum memory setting (I "think" Adobe suggests 75% as the max), I would limit history to between 3 and 6 states when working with such a large file.

Note: the history setting versus memory usage and speed is the same on Mac and PC.

Lets look at PhotoShop with the history set to 8. The computer (Mac or PC) tries to "remember" (hold in RAM) 8 states of your image. Eight states times 230Meg is about 2Gig. While the original poster does have 2Gig of RAM, both the OS and PS takes some of this, as does any other program that is open. Assuming the original poster’s memory is set to 75%, and that no other program is running, and that no other images are open in PhotoShop: the program has 1.5 Gigs of RAM to run itself and hold images. That is not enough RAM with 2Gig of data to operate on RAM alone, so PhotoShop is using disk space as extra memory. Disk is drastically slower than RAM, and everything slows to a frustratingly slow crawl.

Because this works roughly the same on Mac and PC, this may not be the original poster’s problem.

In article <cfxvd.18898$>, Tabasco1
wrote:

"viz" <viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au> wrote in message news:BDE3B35E.4085%viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au…

Changed over to Mac (G5 2.5, 2 Gig RAM, twin HDD) from a PII 350 (with 1 Gig
RAM and a fancy card). This thing should fly, and generally it does – however I am having difficulty with some features that I did not have before
on the PC (which incidentally was not a bad PS machine once I had identified
the bottlenecks).

When I copy and paste a picture (even a small one) onto a 20×32" 250 dpi poster (more than about 230 Mb), the Mac slows down badly, and moving the pasted picture around (either by grabbing it or inching with the arrow keys)
take up much time and HDD sounds.

Even bad-ass machines take a while to kick around half a gig of data. That is normal.

While on its face you might think I have two and a half gigs of ram copy and pasting such a piddling file should be nothing. Sorry.

Photoshop eats memory like a junkie pops pills! If you booted the system up directly and opened nothing but Photoshop and then directly opened the file and doing nothing else did the copy and paste I believe you would do much better. But that is not a realistic scenario. the fact is that each time you do something in Photoshop it creates a back up so that you can undo your action. When working with a 100 meg file that eats up your memory at an alarming rate.

My main advice is "Patience Grasshopper." 🙂 Well that and don’t experiment on a 100 megabyte file. If you are not sure what you want create a copy of your file but at 72 dpi and experiment on that and then once you have it down switch to the full file. You will save tons of time even in the short run.

For the long run you can setup some monitoring and see if you can find and eliminate any bottle necks. But most Macs are good Photoshop machines out of the box. Note managed expectations may be the key.

Of course you could be waiting several hours for your copy and past and be completely correct that something is seriously wrong. But that is for the next post. 🙂

Charles
Torrance, California
http://www.tcpslashipdomains.com Now accepting PayPal
http://www.tcpslaship.com under construction

On 15/12/04 2:36 AM, in article 141220040735321889%,
"Tom Ferguson" wrote:

How are your history and maximum memory set. With a 230Meg files, these will strongly effect your performance. Both set in the prefs. After chosing a maximum memory setting (I "think" Adobe suggests 75% as the max), I would limit history to between 3 and 6 states when working with such a large file.

Note: the history setting versus memory usage and speed is the same on Mac and PC.

Lets look at PhotoShop with the history set to 8. The computer (Mac or PC) tries to "remember" (hold in RAM) 8 states of your image. Eight states times 230Meg is about 2Gig. While the original poster does have 2Gig of RAM, both the OS and PS takes some of this, as does any other program that is open. Assuming the original poster’s memory is set to 75%, and that no other program is running, and that no other images are open in PhotoShop: the program has 1.5 Gigs of RAM to run itself and hold images. That is not enough RAM with 2Gig of data to operate on RAM alone, so PhotoShop is using disk space as extra memory. Disk is drastically slower than RAM, and everything slows to a frustratingly slow crawl.

Because this works roughly the same on Mac and PC, this may not be the original poster’s problem.

In article <cfxvd.18898$>, Tabasco1
wrote:

"viz" <viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au> wrote in message news:BDE3B35E.4085%viz@*nospam*.pacific.net.au…

Changed over to Mac (G5 2.5, 2 Gig RAM, twin HDD) from a PII 350 (with 1 Gig
RAM and a fancy card). This thing should fly, and generally it does – however I am having difficulty with some features that I did not have before
on the PC (which incidentally was not a bad PS machine once I had identified
the bottlenecks).

When I copy and paste a picture (even a small one) onto a 20×32" 250 dpi poster (more than about 230 Mb), the Mac slows down badly, and moving the pasted picture around (either by grabbing it or inching with the arrow keys)
take up much time and HDD sounds.

Even bad-ass machines take a while to kick around half a gig of data. That is normal.

While on its face you might think I have two and a half gigs of ram copy and pasting such a piddling file should be nothing. Sorry.

Photoshop eats memory like a junkie pops pills! If you booted the system up directly and opened nothing but Photoshop and then directly opened the file and doing nothing else did the copy and paste I believe you would do much better. But that is not a realistic scenario. the fact is that each time you do something in Photoshop it creates a back up so that you can undo your action. When working with a 100 meg file that eats up your memory at an alarming rate.

My main advice is "Patience Grasshopper." 🙂 Well that and don’t experiment on a 100 megabyte file. If you are not sure what you want create a copy of your file but at 72 dpi and experiment on that and then once you have it down switch to the full file. You will save tons of time even in the short run.

For the long run you can setup some monitoring and see if you can find and eliminate any bottle necks. But most Macs are good Photoshop machines out of the box. Note managed expectations may be the key.

Of course you could be waiting several hours for your copy and past and be completely correct that something is seriously wrong. But that is for the next post. 🙂

Charles
Torrance, California
http://www.tcpslashipdomains.com Now accepting PayPal
http://www.tcpslaship.com under construction

History states, huh? Looked that up in preferences I have 40…! Changed that to 10. See how that goes. I have about 1275 Mb of RAM available for PS (70% of about 1750 MB free).

One thing with the PC (PII 350 1 Gig RAM – and *old* machine), regardless of the arguments used so far, it never hesitated with copy and paste. But then I never had 40 history states set (now how did *that* get there???)

Thanks so far 🙂

/viz