Memory Allocation with Elements on a Mac

MR
Posted By
Mark_Reibman
Feb 8, 2004
Views
302
Replies
7
Status
Closed
As an experiment I went into my preferences for memory and increased memory for Elements and it’s speed has increased. I have 640mb RAM installed. It states in preferences that 533 is available. I boosted it from about 250mb to about 450mb as an experiment. And it worked to improve the speed in some of the slower functions, like ‘save for web’, filters,etc. For those who have a lot of RAM, what do you use? Does Photoshop Elements consume over 250MB of RAM for some functions? I haven’t been able to find any info, guidelines about this in the books or through ‘help’ so if you know something about this please enlighten me. Especially Mac OS X users.
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Beth_Haney
Feb 8, 2004
I thought we weren’t supposed to have to worry about memory settings in OS X! I haven’t fiddled, so I can’t answer your question. I’m so well behaved that one somebody tells me OS X is self-managing, I assume it’s true. 🙂
NS
Nancy_S
Feb 8, 2004
Mark,

I have Windows XP Pro. I never changed the preferences for memory. I was curious after reading your post so went to look at my settings. My system has 1G of DDR Ram and PSE has allocated 50% of it on its own accord. There is never a wait for functions longer than a couple seconds for complicated calculations.

Nancy
MR
Mark_Reibman
Feb 8, 2004
I think this question is going to be relevant to someone like myself with something close to my 500mhz G3’s speed where some memory intensive functions of Elements can run quite slowly. Beth, OS X does automatically allocate memory but you can also adjust it within Elements. I’d rather be using RAM memory than my Hardrive. I wonder if anyone knows just how much RAM Elements can use for it’s more complicated functions? I’ve tried playing with Elements on a newer PC and the more current and faster Mac G4’s. Most of the functions that I have to wait for are almost instantaneous on these newer machines. As I do not want to buy a new Mac yet, I’m trying to get as much performance out of it as possible. And it is Elements that is the program that demands the most of my iMac.

Nancy, Your 50% of RAM is almost equivalent to my 100%, plus you probably have a faster processor.
EW
Ed_Wurster
Feb 8, 2004
wrote:
Elements. I’d rather be using RAM memory than my Hardrive. I wonder if anyone knows just how much RAM Elements can use for it’s more complicated functions? I’ve tried playing with Elements on a newer PC and the more current and faster Mac G4’s. Most of the functions that I have to wait for are almost instantaneous on these newer machines. As I do not want to buy a new Mac yet, I’m trying to get as much performance out of it as possible. And it is Elements that is the program that demands the most of my iMac.

It’s a balancing act for sure, and more RAM is always better than VM.

I think that the memory setting in preferences is nice to have on a Mac, and necessary on a PC if you use PSE extensively.

Ed
SS
Susan_S.
Feb 8, 2004
Mine is set at 70 per cent (600Mhz G3 imac) -I’ve 756Mb RAM in total. I’ve read in my lurks on the full PS forum that if you go too high with that per cent figure you can actually worsen performance as the system and other apps have to start paging memory in and out of RAM too much. Mine isn’t superquick, but then I tend to have a lot of things running at one time…
MR
Mark_Reibman
Feb 9, 2004
Susan,

I think the main thing that one wants to avoid is using virtual memory. Elements would really drag with anything but basic functions, like Unsharp Mask which now almost appears within a second or two and does it’s thing instaneously,whereas previously it was a bit of a wait for the dialogue box to open. I don’t need everything to be superfast but I do seem to have brought the functions out of that kind of dragginess that it seemed to have before I changed the memory allocation. From my experience, it would appear that 256mb of RAM is not enough for Elements. Something closer to 400mb is what it likes. It sounds like, at 70%, you have about the same allocation.

I’m delighted to have this extra speed as I happen to really like my little Indigo iMac and would rather not have to replace it.
PD
Pete_D
Feb 9, 2004
< I wonder if anyone knows just how much RAM Elements can use for it’s more complicated functions?

Mark,

I seem to recall someone (Mac probably) saying that Elements would use no more than 2gb. Might have been that thread where Jodi was upgrading memory.

For others experimenting, leave enough ram for the OS and other applications:)

Pete

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