PS CS Speed on a G4 power mac

RS
Posted By
Richard_Sjolund
Jun 10, 2004
Views
525
Replies
24
Status
Closed
I am still using my one year-old dual G4 1.4 Mac computer with 2 GB of RAM (and looking at the new dual 2.5 G5). After getting my Kodak DCS back for a Hasselblad 555ELD I started using 16-bit imaging on Photoshop CS — and found, of course, that processing of large images (30X30 inches at 360 dpi – about 660 MB) slowed to a crawl. I have my memory usage set to 70%. Using the healing brush to remove dust spots (even CCD imagers get dust) requires about 5 seconds or more per fix.

I opended the little program called "Activity Monitor", it’s in the OS X applications file — under "utilities". Running the monitor allows you to see what your CPU — or CPUs in the dual series — are doing in real time. It makes vertical bar graphs and the green bars go up and down as your CPUs go to work. It is easiest to watch with dual monitors.

It is VERY interesting to watch the bars as Photoshop CS works on my images. The results indicate that there are very few times when the CPUs are working at the maximum levlel. I watch the spinning "beach ball", waiting for an effect, and the CPUs are loafing.

That suggests that something other than CPU size or speed is the limiting factor. My hard drives are 120GB 7200 RPM, and I suspected that writing to them might be the limiting factor. I partitioned one of the drives into 2 partitions: PS Scratch Disk and PS Images. I set the PS preferences to use only the first disk partition for the scratch (clean and reformatted) and then copied my "working image" into the second partition (PS Images. That should cure any problems with fragmentation.

The result? About the same. The spinning beach ball still spins while the activity monitor shows little CPU usage.

I note with some despair that the newest and greatest G5 2.5 still uses 7200 RPM hard drives. Is this the limiting factor? There are (Raptor) 10,000 RPM drives available and I might go that route.

Can someone with a dual 2.0 GB G5 open a big 16-bit file and run the activity monitor??? Are your CPUs really busy all the time??? What is the delay while using the healing brush??

The current speed (or lack thereof) makes for very long days. I estimate that 30% of my day is spent watching some kind of bar crawl accross the screen — or a spinning beach ball.

Let me (us) know what you see.

Thanks

Dick

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

GB
g_ballard
Jun 10, 2004
you loaded the 8.0 MP updater?
Chris Cox "Photoshop CS MPSupport plugin update is available" 5/20/04 5:24pm </cgi-bin/webx?13/58>

Done any system maintenance?

16-bit with adjustment and type layers are slow here too

BTW, this has been discussed here many times, try adding

cox
fraser
byer

to your seaarch…
R
Ram
Jun 10, 2004
Ramón G Castañeda "Repair Permissions BEFORE AND AFTER installing software (for the FAQs?)" 6/2/04 8:12pm </cgi-bin/webx?50>
GB
g_ballard
Jun 10, 2004
careful, Ramón, that’s how I got started with my site 😉
B
Buko
Jun 10, 2004
and there is this Welles Goodrich "Photoshop CS Adjusted Refresh plug-in now available" 6/2/04 7:05pm </cgi-bin/webx?14/0>
R
Ram
Jun 10, 2004
G,

Ah, but this doesn’t cost me anything. 🙂
R
Ram
Jun 10, 2004
Actually, G, if you put those Apple links on your site, I can forget about the thread I started. I’ll just point more folks to your web site. 🙂
RS
Richard_Sjolund
Jun 10, 2004
G,

Yes I added the updated plugins, an yes, I repaired the permissions. I’m just curious to know what the machine (G4 or G5) is doing while bars, spinning beach balls, and clocks show a delay, BUT the CPU monitor shows little or no activity.

I should have added G4 or G5 to my topic title to catch the G5 users.

What is the limiting factor other the CPU speed???

Dick
R
Ram
Jun 10, 2004
What is the limiting factor other the CPU speed?

Haxies, other apps, the % of maximum memory assigned to Photoshop, drives, allowing Background processing in the File Browser, who knows what else.
GB
g_ballard
Jun 10, 2004
Other than what Ram—n has said, I don’t have the expertise to offer an opinion.

Adobe’s Scott Byer has explained the nuts & bolts here numerous times…and the subject has been discussed indepth more than that.

Maybe also add speed or slow or optimize to your…?
B
Buko
Jun 10, 2004
How much RAM do you have allocated to Photoshop??
R
Ram
Jun 10, 2004
Buko,

He said 70% of 2GB. That doesn’t sound like the problem.
B
Buko
Jun 10, 2004
then how much room left on the system drive? Spinning beach ball means the system is thinking.

does a new user speed things up?
GB
g_ballard
Jun 10, 2004
Ram—n, I updated our troubleshooting page, let me know if I got it right (both your links, pulled off another page here, were the same?)…

<http://www.gballard.net/psd/troubleshootpurgepsd.html>
R
Ram
Jun 11, 2004
G,

Actually, the paragraph that begins with my name has the wrong link, the one that leads you to the general maintenance article, rather than the one that discusses Repairing Permissions BEFORE and after every installation. Since you are not reproducing the excerpt on your web page, I think you should have the correct link there, which is:

<http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?14@@.68941aef/1>

(Hope I didn’t break the margins here)

Perhaps you could add an indication to "Scroll to Post #2 there" or something like that.

In all fairness, you should delete my name and post the user ID of the author of the original pst on the Apple discussion board, "Gulliver64".
RS
Richard_Sjolund
Jun 11, 2004
Buko, g ballard, and Ramón G Castañeda,

Thank you for your replies. Unfortunately, none of them addressed my original question: what does the Mac CPU activity monitor show while using PS CS on a large 16-bit image on either a G4 or a G5 with maxed out RAM?

Your help sites are very useful and I bookmarked them to send to other Mac users. However, I did all those "maintainence’ steps before and I still have a slow system. I’ve been using photoshop on my Macs since version 2.5 and a IIfx in 1993.

Maybe I should re-post this with G4 and G5 in the title of the topic. Or, perhaps you know of a better forum for Mac and Photoshop questions?

Again, the question is: what does the activity monitor show your CPUs to be doing while using PS CS on a G4 versus a G5 — where memory is "maxed"? Are there long delays where the CPUs are not working???

Dick
VL
Venicia_L
Jun 11, 2004
Richard,

That is a fair enough question. I would like to see an answer also.

VL
GP
Graham_Phillips
Jun 11, 2004
It is a fair question, but it involves taking the machine to the limit: something which other users may not be willing or even know how to do.
VL
Venicia_L_2
Jun 11, 2004
Try.

VL
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Jun 12, 2004
Sorry Venicia but I just don’t have any inclination — or time — to do so. And I don’t have "Maxed-out RAM" anyway.

All I can tell you is that CS runs very well for me on a G5 2×2 and I have no complaints about speed.
IL
Ian_Lyons
Jun 12, 2004
With respect to Processor usage the info provide by Activity Monitor isn’t all that accurate so drawing any kind of conclusion from it is pointless. A much better guide to what is happening would be running Terminal – open Terminal from the Utilities folder and then type "Top". The top end of Terminal window tells you overall processor usage in terms of the User, System and Idle. Further down you will find a table with lots of rapidly changing numbers. If you’re running Photoshop it will be listed and from the data you will see the % of processor usage. You might on the very odd occasion get it to max out, but more often than not it will be well below (thankfully or everything else would die).

The spinning beach-ball (SBOD) is usually a sign of the System (possibly Photoshop) waiting to access something and more often than not it’s the hard disk (sometimes nothing more sinister than a disk drive going to sleep). Some bugs in earlier builds of the OS were known to result in the SPOD although I’ve not seen any evidence of these bugs reappearing since the release of 10.3.3
VL
Venicia_L
Jun 13, 2004
Thanks Ian,

That helps. Some.

"With respect to Processor usage the info provide by Activity Monitor isn’t all that accurate so drawing any kind of conclusion from it is pointless."

I wish this kind of information were more readily available. Too many things about the OS are shrouded in some kind of gratutitous explanation to "shield" the questioner from facts deemed too difficult to comprehend by anyone who is uninformed enough to have to ask the question. The other response any one gets who is not a computer scientist in the first place, is a complex circular definition of computer terms from someone who has no concept of communicating with anyone outside the world of digital circuits.

Communicating specifics of any technology to those outside the field, or less knowledgable has always been a need. I daily deal with customers who have never heard CMYK, subtractive color or DSLR. And, yes, these concepts DO seem like rocket science to them, initially. For those who ask, I would consider it a failure on my part, if they left my office without understanding the concepts implicity, in valid terms, understandable to them, not of industry jargon.

VL
RS
Richard_Sjolund
Jun 13, 2004
Thanks to all of you.

I’ve done a few more tests while using the activity monitor to see CPU and hard drive activity. I played around with loading PS CS on one of my two G4 drives and using the other drive for the scratch folder. I do believe that the speed of writing/reading to/from the hard drive is a major "block’ in getting high speed with PS CS and Mac OS.

I’m using a dual 1.4 GHz G4, and the speed of writing or reading from the hard drives appears to be a major factor in PS CS processing times.

It is interesting to note that the newer G5s have a different way of communicating with hard drives, and that it is significantly faster. The G5 uses a serial ATA instead of the G4s parallel ATA.

From Apple:

G4
The Power Mac G4 features two hard disk interfaces – one ATA/100, offering maximum data throughput of 100MB per second, and a second ATA/66, offering maximum data throughput of 66MB per second.

G5
Serial ATA is the next-generation industry-standard storage interface, replacing the Parallel ATA interface. Designed to keep pace with the demands of digital video creation and editing, audio storage and playback, and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA supports 1.5-Gbps throughput per channel. >>>>>>>>>

The G5 with serial ATA can handle Gigabytes per second to and from both drives, as opposed to 100 MB on the G4 main drive and 66 Megabytes per second on the second G4 drive. That should have profound implications for getting data from a large image file, and for writing to a scratch disk file, especially for image files that are greater than 500 MB. Hard drive operations may be MORE important than raw CPU clock speeds for PS CS. In the future, we can only hope that the Mac OS and PS CS will utilize more RAM and be able to run all operations via RAM rather than hard drives.

And, as expected, when my activity monitor shows my G4 CPUs to be "coasting", it also shows my hard drives to be running at "max". I assume that having the scratch disk on a second drive is an advantage because the Mac should be able to access both drives simultaneously. If the program and the file and the scratch folder are all on the same disk, they would have to be accessed one at a time.

I see these results as a very good reason to be replacing my G4 with a new G5 2.5, and using the two drive to separate PS functions from the scratch disk by having two drives.

This has been interesting and I’ve learned a lot. After spending 33 years as a cell biology professor, I still like to do experiments and see real data.

Now, I’d like to see some data from a G5 user!

Dick
R
Ram
Jun 13, 2004
Too many things about the OS are shrouded in some kind of gratutitous explanation to "shield" the questioner from facts deemed too difficult to comprehend by anyone who is uninformed enough to have to ask the question.

That, indeed, is one of the reasons I was so reluctant to move up to OS X.

If Photoshop 8 ran in 9.2.2, I’d leave Panther in a heartbeat.
IL
Ian_Lyons
Jun 13, 2004
Richard,

I think that X Resource Graph is a much better option when it comes to seeing graphically what is happening at OS level. It is also much more accurate then Activity Monitor. You can download from:

<http://www.starcoder.com/xrg/>

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

Related Discussion Topics

Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections