Hi, I just upgraded recently to a Dell computer running Vista 64 and with 8 gigs memory and thought that would be enough for Photoshop. I worked today for about 2 hours opening raw scenery files in Bridge and making heavy use of the adjustment brush in camera and heavy use of other camera raw tools. Each file that was brought into Photoshop was further modified there and then closed.
When I went to open another file, I was told it could not be done because of a lack of memory. Photoshop was using 5.6 gigs of RAM. Bridge was using another 0.5 gig.
Photoshop is set (left default setting established by Photoshop) to use scratch space on drive C which because I just started with this computer a few days ago has about 500 gigs of free contiguous space. But actually I don’t to make much use of scratch space because such use would slow computer down.
Does the 64 bit version just keep taking more and more RAM without releasing any after a file is closed? I gave computer several minutes wait to see if Photoshop would release memory–nope.
Everything ran fine until that error, machine did not slow down at all.
Its annoying to have to close Photoshop because it doesn’t release memory.
Are other people finding that the program fails to release memory?
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Hi, I just upgraded recently to a Dell computer running Vista 64 and with 8 gigs memory and thought that would be enough for Photoshop. I worked today for about 2 hours opening raw scenery files in Bridge and making heavy use of the adjustment brush in camera and heavy use of other camera raw tools. Each file that was brought into Photoshop was further modified there and then closed.
When I went to open another file, I was told it could not be done because of a lack of memory. Photoshop was using 5.6 gigs of RAM. Bridge was using another 0.5 gig.
Photoshop is set (left default setting established by Photoshop) to use scratch space on drive C which because I just started with this computer a few days ago has about 500 gigs of free contiguous space. But actually I don’t to make much use of scratch space because such use would slow computer down.
Does the 64 bit version just keep taking more and more RAM without releasing any after a file is closed? I gave computer several minutes wait to see if Photoshop would release memory–nope.
Everything ran fine until that error, machine did not slow down at all. Its annoying to have to close Photoshop because it doesn’t release memory. Are other people finding that the program fails to release memory?
Even if PS released the memory, Windows might not honor the request until PS stops. I didn’t realize that the user has any control over how PS uses the scratch space. Jim
I can’t speak for 64-bit, but it has been said by Adobe that Photoshop does not release memory when you close files, only when you close Photoshop. Though, it should be able to reuse any memory that it has already been using so you shouldn’t be getting that error message. Maybe someone from Adobe can shed some light.
I bought a computer with 8 gigs of RAM because I believed that using hard disk space to store memory items is much slower than storing them in RAM. My machine runs Photoshop very fast. Have to have scratch space on system drive because that drive is actually composed of 2 600 gig drives that came configured in a spanning RAID array–giving 1.2 T of space. No room in computer for another drive. Presume assigning scratch space to a USB drive is not a good idea.
The error message was from Photoshop. It said something about not being able to fill my request because of a lack of memory.
Photoshop was not reusing memory–if it had been, it never would have taken up 5.6 gigs. My files were not enormous. Most files as raw were ca 16-17 megs. Those that I made substantial changes to and saved as psd files became 70-75 or rarely 80 megs in size. I closed each file after processing it. I think if Photoshop was properly reusing memory,it never could have swollen to 5.6 gigs.
I would suspect that in fact the RAW loader is not correctly unloading its stuff due to incorrect process instanciation, not Photoshop itself. I vaguely seem to remember such stuff being described some place on a German website or forum, probably in the context of a similar issue for Lightroom 2 (which should have been fixed there with the latest update). In the short run, your only solution is to quit PS every now and then to terminate the process and purge all memory until the devs can fix this with the planned mini-update.
What version of the Camera Raw (CR) plug-in do you have? Are you opening them into Ps as Smart Objects or just images? What camera model and format are you using?
Allocating too much of the memory shown as available in Photoshop prefereces > Performance is not a good idea. Try lowering it to within the "Ideal Range" recommended by Photoshop.
PS does not always re-uses existing allocation if a new image does not fit into allocated contigous blocks.
Example:
Open 10 125MB files — ok, allocation is 1.5G give or take.
Close all files
Allocation remains at 1.5G — this is how it is designed.
Now, Open a 540Meg file.
PS will allocate an additional 500 or so Meg. Memory jumps past 2.2G and thrashing starts.
There are long discussions in the beta group on this.
The momory allocation scheme was built-in to speed PS operations. But images are now so large, the the memory manager will have to be redisigned prior to the next generation of imaging, or there will be real trouble.
I am not sure about "or at the request of the OS". I used to write OS kernel and MM code. If an app has blocks of heap, it may or may not relinquish it depending on how it is written. The garbage collection daemon rarely has the option to force block release. Most common exceptions are the algorithms for deadlock. MM can force paging, but performance goes through the floor. In CS4, PS maps its tile management scheme onto a 3D model. PS wants blocks to be contiguous for performance. This scheme is already failing. As images get much bigger over the next few years, it will break-down completely. There is a thread where users are experiencing PS allocating 12GB of RAM and then not releasing it upon closing documents. This code architecture was fine when folks shot 8MP cameras. Now it is 21MP, next year 45MP will be released. I regularly do panas at 1.2GB. This architecture will not survive much longer. PS must learn to deal with memory management or folks will simply not use it. Aperature is already gaining market share.
IBM will be building a 20 petaflop linux based computer with 1.6 million cores for the US Department of Energy. If I ever run into PS CS4 memory limitations I am sure the Department of Energy will let me use that computer until Adobe solves the problem. lol……..
I am not sure about "or at the request of the OS".
it may or may not relinquish it depending on how it is written.
just relaying what chris cox said (recently even). if the os needs ram for another app, photoshop is supposed to honor that request. i don’t work for adobe so i can’t guarantee that statement, but in theory i know it is POSSIBLE that it’s true! 🙂
Photoshop also frees memory when the OS starts paging heavily.
Photoshop works really, really hard to reuse the memory it has (freeing and reallocating is a nasty performance hit).
Some file format plugins allocate buffers outside Photoshop’s memory pool, and opening files with those plugins may thrash memory a bit. We’re also working on a memory problem related to ACR.
Chris: What would happen if there was no memory management in PS?
A memory intensive app like Maya doesn’t use it, nor do a lot of other memory intensive apps and they all seem to work quite well without it.
I always thought that MM in PS was a Mac thing that was put into the Windows version because the early DOS based OSes were crappy at MM, which wasn’t a problem for the NT based OSes.
Bart – without the memory management: Photoshop runs a lot slower (we test it every once in a while), pages a lot more, runs out of memory and fails more often, etc.
The memory management in Photoshop has nothing to do with specific platforms, and everything to do with performance and stability.
Most of what we do is forced by the realities of dealing with large documents, large histories, trying to keep performance reasonable, trying to guarantee results at critical times (do you really want document previews to fail randomly?), etc.
Photoshop works with the OS and negotiates a lot, but retains as much control over our allocated address space as possible. (we can’t allocate address space, or control where it resides in physical RAM, or lots of other bits reserved for the OS and hardware)
Chris mentions there is a memory problem with camera raw. I was using camera raw a lot to modify files before opening them in Photoshop. Possibly, that use contributed to my running out of memory so Photoshop could no longer open files.
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