Slowness in CS2 9.0.2 due to recent files being stat’ed

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Posted By
Pictage
Nov 8, 2006
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334
Replies
5
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Closed
I’m using Windows XP Professional SP2 on a machine with 2 3GHz processors and 1G RAM. I have 62G of free disk space.

Photoshop CS2 9.0.2 with the most recent updates as of today, 11/07/2006.

When I open a file, I use Filemon (sysinternals) to see what Photoshop is doing, and it does the following:

1) Read the requested file
2) For each of the 30 most recently opened files, issue OPEN calls for each directory along the path, Issue a
QUERY INFORMATION for the file
3) Issues alternating READ / QUERY INFORMATION calls for the file I want to open
4) repeat step (2) for all 30 files.
5) Display my file.

This happens for every file I open. If I open three new files, each time it stats the most recent 30 files. The list of 30 recent files is stored in a prefs file, and survives restarting Photoshop and reboots. If the pathnames are long, the amount of time it takes to look up and stat all those files can be substantial.

Basically, if I choose files with a long path and open 30, the first file opens quickly. Subsequent files open slower and slower. Then, if I choose to open 30 files in C:\TEMP, the first file opens slowly, and each subsequent file opens
faster and faster.

If my files are on a networked filesystem, which has necessarily deep directory paths, it takes seconds to open files on the local hard drive after I’ve closed the files on the networked drive, just because Photoshop continues to stat the recent files.

I know there is a recent file menu that contains a list of the 10 most recent files open. But I could find no setting in the preferences that tells it to track the 30 most recent files. Can I disable this feature? or somehow set it to a smaller number (like 3) so that I’m not hitting the Filesystems with lots and lots of directory open and QUERY INFORMATION calls?

It would seem to be unnecessary for photoshop to stat recent files when opening a new file. Can anyone tell me what the original intention or purpose of the behavior is?

Any/all suggestions and assistance is appreciated.

Thank you!

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CC
Chris_Cox
Nov 8, 2006
Photoshop remembers files that are slow to stat, and doesn’t stat them again until you try to select them. If stat’ing the files is taking any user visible time, you’ve got something seriously wrong with your system.
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Pictage
Nov 8, 2006
If what you’re saying is true, then Photoshop should not be stating those files. However… it is. And stating the files is taking user visible time. Stating one file isn’t so bad… it’s the fact that it’s stating 30 files.

The files that are taking a long time
to stat happen to be on a network file system, and they
have a directory depths of about 7 levels. Accessing the network filesystem in the way that Photoshop is doing it takes time because it opens each directory layer along
the way. There is also a possibility that it is doing
something besides the file operations I can see in
Filemon, and if someone knows what else it may be doing
with those 30 files, I’d like to know so I may be able
to make an adjustment there.

My questions are:
1) Why is it stating the last 30 files when I’m asking it to simply open one file? It seems to be unnecessary.
2) How do I turn off this behavior?
3) If I can’t turn off the behavior, is the magic number 30 stored some place where I can adjust it to a smaller
number (like 1 or 0).
CC
Chris_Cox
Nov 8, 2006

1) Because the application needs to know whether it can enable the menu items or not (whether the files are still available or not).
2) You can’t
3) no
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chrisjbirchall
Nov 9, 2006
Because networks are often less than perfect, the regulars here usually recommend copying files across to the local drive and opening and saving them from there. I’m not even sure Photoshop officially supports saving across a network.

Either way, adopting this practise would at least solve your current problem.
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Pictage
Nov 9, 2006
You are correct. Photoshop does not officially support
saving across a network. They also do not officially support drag and drop into their application, and probably
a few other things that people routinely do.
And if that’s the only solution that is available, then
that’s what I will tell my users to do.

I know that there is an "Open Recent" list that is maintained, and the number of images in the list
is tunable. I’m curious why it maintains a list of
30 internally, and why the application needs to
check them each time it opens a new file. Which
menu items does it need to enable in that case?
And why does it need to check on every import?
(Twice for every import actually, according to
my traces.)

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